Elwro
Arcane
I originally wanted to propose this text to VD for publication as an RPGCodex article, but then I remembered about the „articles by staff only” policy and it occurred to me that my textual spewage might not be the pinnacle of gaming journalism I intented it to be. Anyway, here goes:
FRATER
The Road to Hell
previewed by Elwro
Ok, as we all know the whole Western World can barely contain its excitement in aticipation of Rebelmind's new hack'n'slash game „Frater”. To cater to this need I've prepared this preview, based on the Polish-only demo version of the game.
Synopsis: It's quite a good game but it's a pity that the Orbital duo splitted up.
1. The Basics
Calling this game a „fantasy” hack'n'slash wouldn't be 100% appropriate. I guess the „steampunk” label would be more fitting because there's magic, there's technology (gunpowder and funky machines with flashing lights etc.) and instead of a „skill tree” you get a „skill pipeline” (more on that later). There's no steam and punk's dead, but hell, there's no Fanta in Fantasy, too.
After 10 minutes of playing I thought the game was a modern version of Diablo, minus random dungeons, plus active pause and a nice setting. I guess some of you lot think that somehow my opinion transformed as the game imperceptibly morphed into an ambitious project with lots of dialogue, meaningful choices and consequences and, of course, an amnesiac hero. But you're wrong. Frater is a modern version of Diablo, with some appropriate additions. It's not a bad thing.
But first things first. The game supposedly features 3 character types: a male hunky warrior, a female shooter and a spell-wielding monk. (This is of course a repetition of Diablo's fighter / archer / mage scheme.) You can only play the warrior in the demo. The intro shows our hero standing aside an old alchemist on the peak of some Holy Slavic Mountain, as the music vaguely reminiscent (in the beginning) of the 2nd movement (Largo) of Bohuslav Martinu's Double Concerto for 2 string orchestras, piano & timpani plays in the background. (I don't hear the resemblance now myself, but heck... it's a good piece and almost noone knows about it.) There's some generic bullshit about rising evil, opening the gateways to the upper layers of Hell (I guess the lower layers will have to wait for the expansion) and stuff, and of course a laughable 3D model of a Bad Monster eventually appears. After some bruising brutality ensues, we are told to reach a secret Alchemists' Lab in a town recently attacked by foul fiends. The game scores bonus points for including a Chosen One who seems NOT to be the main character; well, maybe it's the plot twist we're not supposed to discover in the demo. In general, the hero traverses some Slavic countryside and towns, trying to purge it of the hellish spawns infesting it. The majority of the demo takes place at night.
You begin the demo at the outskirts of the town you were directed to. You meet two armed survivors, guiding the gates – it seems that the denizens of the place are fighting a losing battle inside. On your way to the supposed location of the Lab, you encounter a stalemate. A group of townfolk barricaded themselves in a street. They're able to kill all enemies who come by, but the foes are almost immediately resurrected by spellcasting daemons. Your first task is to gather a group of men who might still be alive in a few points in town, and then lead them through a roundabout to the other side of the barricade to kill the magic-wielding beasts. Then you're free to look for the Lab. Its location (and mere existence) is, of course, a secret, and you just ask about a house with a certain sign. You're given a single person as a guide and after some time reach the Lab, which will become your headquarters for the rest of the demo, and perhaps the whole game. More on the Lab later.
The demo takes our hero through a few areas of 19th century Poland – a town, a forest, hills, a small village... all of those places are overrun by daemons, undead and the sort. The survivors are still fighting sometimes. Our hero's path is linear, but with some side branches. If we stray from the path we may for example find some villagers defending themselves from an overwhelming force of beasts; if we help fend off the attack, the survivors will join our hero in his future struggles. The appropriate atmosphere „is there” and is I think one of the high points of the game. For example, at night, with a rifle-armed sidekick you enter a burning town that has just been decimated by a hellish force lead by a frightening, fiery creature. You make your way through the place, killing the beasts and saving the lives of a few survivors. They join your group, armed with whatever weapons they could find. When the town is clear, you advance to a hill, where the fiery monster is visible from a distance. You meet a captain of the town guard – his force is down to three men. He's determined to slay the creature, but his men are afraid. He asks you to lead them, and the combined forces of the townfolk and the guards do what they can to aid you in fighting the beast. Many of them won't live to the next day.
What I probably wanted to say in the previous longish and overpretentious paragraph was that the game manages to avoid the „shit, I need a hundred more of those creatures to gain a level *** yawn ***” pit many other Diablo clones have fallen in. At least the demo does.
2. The gameplay and the mechanics.
The game is played in real-time. The gameplay is similar to Diablo with one crucial difference: either my memory fails me, or the Blizzard dumbed-down-roguelike-wannabe didn't have active pause. No matter; what's important is that Frater has it. The action on the monitor can get quite hectic at times and it's good that we can pause the game, judge the situation, choose the appropriate enemy and the correct weapon and attack.
The Lab, as mentioned above, is your headquarters. There are a few alchemists there, from whom you can buy different types of equipment, receive healing and quests. You can also ask for your equipment to be repaired. This can cost quite a sizable sum of money. There's a working teleporter in the Lab – any time in the game, when you press „B”, you're dragged by magical forces from the surface into the Alchemists' dwelling. You can return just to the place you left any time you want. Think Diablo with constant, mobile Town Portal. It didn't struck me as „dumbing down”; frankly, I was thankful for the feature as I had to return to the Lab quite often.
There is no character creation. The stat system is very reminiscent of Diablo: there are four characteristics (Strength, Agility, Forbidden Lore, Vitality) and after advancing to a new level you get 5 points to distribute among them. Items are also similar, with the addition of firearms of different types. Just as in Diablo, many items – spellbooks, scrolls, sabres, revolvers, rifles – have minimal stat requirements.
The items also have a durability. Weapons and armour wear out very quickly and you have to repair them at the Lab.
Fatigue is a factor; its meter gradually decreases while the hero is running and fighting – when it's down to 0, running becomes impossible. It's noticeable sometimes, e.g. if you foolishly begin a fight right after running a long distance, but is not a nuisance. There's also another stat, called „Faith”, but I'm not sure what it does yet. I guess it's important for the Monk character.
The game features a nice skill system. There are three skill trees, depicted as pipelines: offensive, defensive, and „other”. Some of the skills from each range are basic, which means you can allocate your first skill point in them; some are only available if you already have points in certain other skills. After gaining a level of experience you get a single skill point, so the decision may be hard. It is also worth noting that at any given time you can only have one skill active. A few skill examples are: The Virtue of Care (items wear out slower), The Grace of Luck (you find more gold), a few skills concerning resistances to different elements, The Blow of Conversion (by striking an opponent you may make him fight on your side), Finishing Strike (double damage if it's enough to kill the opponent), The Aura of Faith (nocturnal creatures are weaker), Bravado Commanding (members of the party deal more damage but are more vulnerable themselves).
A nice tactical element concerns two sidekicks you can summon: a Golem or a Neferkar. A Golem is of course a slow, but strong creature; a Neferkar is a strange flying device which can snipe your enemies from distance but is low on hp. You can make you companions appear and disappear as you want; however, if their hps reach 0, you have to use a „Golem / Neferkar recovery scroll” which is damn expensive. The sidekicks have their own XP meters and advance independently of you hero; when they gain a level, you choose which of their stats should increase. Aside from summoning and dismissing, you have no control over your sidekicks' actions.
The game also has a small crafting feature. The Alchemists have equipped you with a Crucible of Transformation – a device in which you can throw many diverse items, use gold as a catalyst and receive a single, improved item. Adding items of different equipment types to the pot has different influence on the outcome. Suppose you want to improve a sabre. You can add a piece of armour to make it more durable. You could add a few other pieces of weaponry to increase the damage, but hurt durability. Some potions to decrease the cost in gold. Scrolls to ease the stat requirements... and magical items for various magical effects.
I have to notice that perhaps the game won't suffer from the problem of the hero swimming in gold. In the demo I was constantly struggling to be able to buy a scroll of recovery for my Golem. (Maybe it's just that I suck, though.) These scrolls, equipment repair and crafting can all empty the hero's wallet; not even mentioning the need for buying new items.
We also learn that some events may lead to disturbances in the fabric of Aether, invisible to the common folk. Our hero can spot such anomalies, though. One of them is shown on the above screenshot. After investigating the strange glowing spot we can converse with the gost of a person slain there a while ago. The whole Aether business seems just to be a medium for the game to give us new information with.
The dialogue is sparse and offers no choice for the player. The writing is laughable. Not only is it clumsy, but there are also numerous errors – some are simple typos, but others result from the author's obliviousness to basic rules of Polish ortography. (Hint: Hire me!) There's a glaring error in one of the dialogues, which is unfortunately located right in the centre of the screen; I think it has an effect similar to a swift kick in the nuts on every literate Polish citizen. The developer's webpage is also written in the famous Eastern-European drunken sumo-English style (Hint: Hire me Goddamit! I'd do a little better!). But frankly, dialogue is not the selling point of this game, and it sets the mood properly.
Fans of Rebelmind's previous title, „A Game of Many Names” („Space Hack” for short; it is quite a decent „Diablo meets Alien Breed” game) will notice a few improvements to the interface. First, you no longer need to hold the spacebar to keep the game paused. Second, you can customize the way camera works – how it reacts to the keys or the mousewheel. (There is no problem with limited vision, which for me was a disadvantage of „Space Hack”.) Third, you now have two weapon sets between which you can switch with a single keystroke. The obvious way of utilizing this feature is to start shooting an enemy creature with your rifle and switch to the trusty sabre when it comes closer.
This is especially useful as some creatures, e.g „lupi hominarii” (they look like werewolves), hide themselves among foliage and can make you quite a nasty surprise. If you take care, though, you can spot the beasts early enough, pinch them with a few shots and just finish the job with a few slashes.
The map is also different from the one used by Diablo or Space Hack – it now opens in a small, independent window. It wasn't too useful in the demo, as the locations were hard to get lost in.
There is a fairly standard quest log and a suspicious "Tome of Knowledge" labeled as "not available in the demo", too.
3. The visuals and audio.
The music and sound effects are very good. The artists know the value of silence. The quiet music and sinister sounds maintain the dark atmosphere. I'm not convinced by the short „shout” sample used by some of the townfolk, though. If 10 people (I'm talking about the above-mentioned barricaded guys) emit a high pitched „Heyah!” cry in a neverending pattern, it gets on your nerves after a while.
The visuals are a mixed bag. The scenery is very nice (excluding some of the tree models), the lighting is fine, but people and creatures aren't too detailed. I think the world is at least on par with Guild Wars in terms of graphics, but the creature models are worse. One thing which builds up for this is animation. For example, the motion of our Golem slamming a poor, weak creature and sending it whirling into the air is just superb. You can feel the strength of the construct, even if the model doesn't have thousands of polygons. I guess some of the graphically-inclined fellas will be put off by a very bad portraying of a dragonish creature in the intro. The developers decided to show us the head of the creature in a close-up, which wasn't a good idea as the model is awful. I can just say that overall the game looks quite nice; the visuals certainly don't „get in the way” and are not puke-inducing.
4. The low-down.
The surprising fact is that the demo has been released just recently, contains some broken dialogue and no voice-overs, and yet the game is to ship in Poland on the 5th of September. It will be bundled with a good magazine (CD Action); the whole will cost an equivalent of about 3 beers in a good pub. For this price, it's a must have for anyone who liked Diablo or just wants to play a hack'n'slash game in quite a fresh setting. I have no idea about a Western or Eastern release, though.
I think that it's going to be a very good game and wanted to share the news with the angry, degenerate denizens of the Codex and any innocent passers-by. If anyone cares, give me some feedback on whether you'd be interested in a review of the full version.
The game's website: http://frater.rebelmind.com/en/game (I swear it's not a tubgirl)
FRATER
The Road to Hell
previewed by Elwro
Ok, as we all know the whole Western World can barely contain its excitement in aticipation of Rebelmind's new hack'n'slash game „Frater”. To cater to this need I've prepared this preview, based on the Polish-only demo version of the game.
Synopsis: It's quite a good game but it's a pity that the Orbital duo splitted up.
1. The Basics
Calling this game a „fantasy” hack'n'slash wouldn't be 100% appropriate. I guess the „steampunk” label would be more fitting because there's magic, there's technology (gunpowder and funky machines with flashing lights etc.) and instead of a „skill tree” you get a „skill pipeline” (more on that later). There's no steam and punk's dead, but hell, there's no Fanta in Fantasy, too.
After 10 minutes of playing I thought the game was a modern version of Diablo, minus random dungeons, plus active pause and a nice setting. I guess some of you lot think that somehow my opinion transformed as the game imperceptibly morphed into an ambitious project with lots of dialogue, meaningful choices and consequences and, of course, an amnesiac hero. But you're wrong. Frater is a modern version of Diablo, with some appropriate additions. It's not a bad thing.
But first things first. The game supposedly features 3 character types: a male hunky warrior, a female shooter and a spell-wielding monk. (This is of course a repetition of Diablo's fighter / archer / mage scheme.) You can only play the warrior in the demo. The intro shows our hero standing aside an old alchemist on the peak of some Holy Slavic Mountain, as the music vaguely reminiscent (in the beginning) of the 2nd movement (Largo) of Bohuslav Martinu's Double Concerto for 2 string orchestras, piano & timpani plays in the background. (I don't hear the resemblance now myself, but heck... it's a good piece and almost noone knows about it.) There's some generic bullshit about rising evil, opening the gateways to the upper layers of Hell (I guess the lower layers will have to wait for the expansion) and stuff, and of course a laughable 3D model of a Bad Monster eventually appears. After some bruising brutality ensues, we are told to reach a secret Alchemists' Lab in a town recently attacked by foul fiends. The game scores bonus points for including a Chosen One who seems NOT to be the main character; well, maybe it's the plot twist we're not supposed to discover in the demo. In general, the hero traverses some Slavic countryside and towns, trying to purge it of the hellish spawns infesting it. The majority of the demo takes place at night.
You begin the demo at the outskirts of the town you were directed to. You meet two armed survivors, guiding the gates – it seems that the denizens of the place are fighting a losing battle inside. On your way to the supposed location of the Lab, you encounter a stalemate. A group of townfolk barricaded themselves in a street. They're able to kill all enemies who come by, but the foes are almost immediately resurrected by spellcasting daemons. Your first task is to gather a group of men who might still be alive in a few points in town, and then lead them through a roundabout to the other side of the barricade to kill the magic-wielding beasts. Then you're free to look for the Lab. Its location (and mere existence) is, of course, a secret, and you just ask about a house with a certain sign. You're given a single person as a guide and after some time reach the Lab, which will become your headquarters for the rest of the demo, and perhaps the whole game. More on the Lab later.
The demo takes our hero through a few areas of 19th century Poland – a town, a forest, hills, a small village... all of those places are overrun by daemons, undead and the sort. The survivors are still fighting sometimes. Our hero's path is linear, but with some side branches. If we stray from the path we may for example find some villagers defending themselves from an overwhelming force of beasts; if we help fend off the attack, the survivors will join our hero in his future struggles. The appropriate atmosphere „is there” and is I think one of the high points of the game. For example, at night, with a rifle-armed sidekick you enter a burning town that has just been decimated by a hellish force lead by a frightening, fiery creature. You make your way through the place, killing the beasts and saving the lives of a few survivors. They join your group, armed with whatever weapons they could find. When the town is clear, you advance to a hill, where the fiery monster is visible from a distance. You meet a captain of the town guard – his force is down to three men. He's determined to slay the creature, but his men are afraid. He asks you to lead them, and the combined forces of the townfolk and the guards do what they can to aid you in fighting the beast. Many of them won't live to the next day.
What I probably wanted to say in the previous longish and overpretentious paragraph was that the game manages to avoid the „shit, I need a hundred more of those creatures to gain a level *** yawn ***” pit many other Diablo clones have fallen in. At least the demo does.
2. The gameplay and the mechanics.
The game is played in real-time. The gameplay is similar to Diablo with one crucial difference: either my memory fails me, or the Blizzard dumbed-down-roguelike-wannabe didn't have active pause. No matter; what's important is that Frater has it. The action on the monitor can get quite hectic at times and it's good that we can pause the game, judge the situation, choose the appropriate enemy and the correct weapon and attack.
The Lab, as mentioned above, is your headquarters. There are a few alchemists there, from whom you can buy different types of equipment, receive healing and quests. You can also ask for your equipment to be repaired. This can cost quite a sizable sum of money. There's a working teleporter in the Lab – any time in the game, when you press „B”, you're dragged by magical forces from the surface into the Alchemists' dwelling. You can return just to the place you left any time you want. Think Diablo with constant, mobile Town Portal. It didn't struck me as „dumbing down”; frankly, I was thankful for the feature as I had to return to the Lab quite often.
There is no character creation. The stat system is very reminiscent of Diablo: there are four characteristics (Strength, Agility, Forbidden Lore, Vitality) and after advancing to a new level you get 5 points to distribute among them. Items are also similar, with the addition of firearms of different types. Just as in Diablo, many items – spellbooks, scrolls, sabres, revolvers, rifles – have minimal stat requirements.
The items also have a durability. Weapons and armour wear out very quickly and you have to repair them at the Lab.
Fatigue is a factor; its meter gradually decreases while the hero is running and fighting – when it's down to 0, running becomes impossible. It's noticeable sometimes, e.g. if you foolishly begin a fight right after running a long distance, but is not a nuisance. There's also another stat, called „Faith”, but I'm not sure what it does yet. I guess it's important for the Monk character.
The game features a nice skill system. There are three skill trees, depicted as pipelines: offensive, defensive, and „other”. Some of the skills from each range are basic, which means you can allocate your first skill point in them; some are only available if you already have points in certain other skills. After gaining a level of experience you get a single skill point, so the decision may be hard. It is also worth noting that at any given time you can only have one skill active. A few skill examples are: The Virtue of Care (items wear out slower), The Grace of Luck (you find more gold), a few skills concerning resistances to different elements, The Blow of Conversion (by striking an opponent you may make him fight on your side), Finishing Strike (double damage if it's enough to kill the opponent), The Aura of Faith (nocturnal creatures are weaker), Bravado Commanding (members of the party deal more damage but are more vulnerable themselves).
A nice tactical element concerns two sidekicks you can summon: a Golem or a Neferkar. A Golem is of course a slow, but strong creature; a Neferkar is a strange flying device which can snipe your enemies from distance but is low on hp. You can make you companions appear and disappear as you want; however, if their hps reach 0, you have to use a „Golem / Neferkar recovery scroll” which is damn expensive. The sidekicks have their own XP meters and advance independently of you hero; when they gain a level, you choose which of their stats should increase. Aside from summoning and dismissing, you have no control over your sidekicks' actions.
The game also has a small crafting feature. The Alchemists have equipped you with a Crucible of Transformation – a device in which you can throw many diverse items, use gold as a catalyst and receive a single, improved item. Adding items of different equipment types to the pot has different influence on the outcome. Suppose you want to improve a sabre. You can add a piece of armour to make it more durable. You could add a few other pieces of weaponry to increase the damage, but hurt durability. Some potions to decrease the cost in gold. Scrolls to ease the stat requirements... and magical items for various magical effects.
I have to notice that perhaps the game won't suffer from the problem of the hero swimming in gold. In the demo I was constantly struggling to be able to buy a scroll of recovery for my Golem. (Maybe it's just that I suck, though.) These scrolls, equipment repair and crafting can all empty the hero's wallet; not even mentioning the need for buying new items.
We also learn that some events may lead to disturbances in the fabric of Aether, invisible to the common folk. Our hero can spot such anomalies, though. One of them is shown on the above screenshot. After investigating the strange glowing spot we can converse with the gost of a person slain there a while ago. The whole Aether business seems just to be a medium for the game to give us new information with.
The dialogue is sparse and offers no choice for the player. The writing is laughable. Not only is it clumsy, but there are also numerous errors – some are simple typos, but others result from the author's obliviousness to basic rules of Polish ortography. (Hint: Hire me!) There's a glaring error in one of the dialogues, which is unfortunately located right in the centre of the screen; I think it has an effect similar to a swift kick in the nuts on every literate Polish citizen. The developer's webpage is also written in the famous Eastern-European drunken sumo-English style (Hint: Hire me Goddamit! I'd do a little better!). But frankly, dialogue is not the selling point of this game, and it sets the mood properly.
Fans of Rebelmind's previous title, „A Game of Many Names” („Space Hack” for short; it is quite a decent „Diablo meets Alien Breed” game) will notice a few improvements to the interface. First, you no longer need to hold the spacebar to keep the game paused. Second, you can customize the way camera works – how it reacts to the keys or the mousewheel. (There is no problem with limited vision, which for me was a disadvantage of „Space Hack”.) Third, you now have two weapon sets between which you can switch with a single keystroke. The obvious way of utilizing this feature is to start shooting an enemy creature with your rifle and switch to the trusty sabre when it comes closer.
This is especially useful as some creatures, e.g „lupi hominarii” (they look like werewolves), hide themselves among foliage and can make you quite a nasty surprise. If you take care, though, you can spot the beasts early enough, pinch them with a few shots and just finish the job with a few slashes.
The map is also different from the one used by Diablo or Space Hack – it now opens in a small, independent window. It wasn't too useful in the demo, as the locations were hard to get lost in.
There is a fairly standard quest log and a suspicious "Tome of Knowledge" labeled as "not available in the demo", too.
3. The visuals and audio.
The music and sound effects are very good. The artists know the value of silence. The quiet music and sinister sounds maintain the dark atmosphere. I'm not convinced by the short „shout” sample used by some of the townfolk, though. If 10 people (I'm talking about the above-mentioned barricaded guys) emit a high pitched „Heyah!” cry in a neverending pattern, it gets on your nerves after a while.
The visuals are a mixed bag. The scenery is very nice (excluding some of the tree models), the lighting is fine, but people and creatures aren't too detailed. I think the world is at least on par with Guild Wars in terms of graphics, but the creature models are worse. One thing which builds up for this is animation. For example, the motion of our Golem slamming a poor, weak creature and sending it whirling into the air is just superb. You can feel the strength of the construct, even if the model doesn't have thousands of polygons. I guess some of the graphically-inclined fellas will be put off by a very bad portraying of a dragonish creature in the intro. The developers decided to show us the head of the creature in a close-up, which wasn't a good idea as the model is awful. I can just say that overall the game looks quite nice; the visuals certainly don't „get in the way” and are not puke-inducing.
4. The low-down.
The surprising fact is that the demo has been released just recently, contains some broken dialogue and no voice-overs, and yet the game is to ship in Poland on the 5th of September. It will be bundled with a good magazine (CD Action); the whole will cost an equivalent of about 3 beers in a good pub. For this price, it's a must have for anyone who liked Diablo or just wants to play a hack'n'slash game in quite a fresh setting. I have no idea about a Western or Eastern release, though.
I think that it's going to be a very good game and wanted to share the news with the angry, degenerate denizens of the Codex and any innocent passers-by. If anyone cares, give me some feedback on whether you'd be interested in a review of the full version.
The game's website: http://frater.rebelmind.com/en/game (I swear it's not a tubgirl)
I'm Elwro's alt who wanted to bump this thread, saw that by some extreme coincidence someone has made a reply, and forgot to logout.)
but besides it looks decent. Full review would be nice too, and no Polish bias please :wink: .
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