Deadly Sin 2: Shining Path Game Review by Kenneth Andrews
Game Rating = 3/5
A totally standard but basically competent downloadable Role playing game Deadly Sin will not win any awards for originality, or indeed for anything, but is pretty good fun for newcomers to the genre.
THREE REASONS TO BUY
Clear instructions
Colourful graphics
Good introduction to RPGs in general
THREE REASONS NOT TO BUY
Irritating music
Interminable cutscenes
Highly derivative plot
Young apprentice Mage Lorelai wakes to find her guardian, Winchester, has left on a mysterious quest. He leaves a note asking her to take a letter to the nearby capital city. No sooner does she leave the house though, than giant spiders are attacking her, and demons are coming to drag her to the Abyss. Exciting, and yet strangely familiar, stuff!
Gameplay
Deadly Sin’s gameplay should be completely familiar to casual gamers. Controlled entirely from the keyboard (the arrow keys and Enter take most of the strain), Lorelai travels through a top-down world as a cartoonish sprite, before switching to a horizontal screen for combat. For new gamers, it’s an easy system to pick up, and its familiarity means anyone who has ever played an RPG before will know exactly what to expect. Although the game puts the player straight into action exploring the monster-strewn forests around Winchester’s house, the dialogue scenes between Lorelai and her first party member, Blade, are excruciatingly slow as you need to click your way through lengthy banter. This establishes their characters and their relationship, but needed to be broken up in smaller chunks.
Graphics and Sound
The graphics for Deadly Sin are competent, but by no means flashy. The top-down view for exploring the game’s world is cartoonish and solid, with the bare minimum of animation (torches flicker, Lorelai’s ponytail sways from side to side as she walks). For combat sequence, the background art of underground tunnels and woodland is exceptionally well-drawn, as are the monsters and our heros, but the minimalistic animation becomes ridiculous, the sprites flash rather than move. Which is a shame, as the animation for magic spells and special attacks is really rather neat and well-executed, highlighting the static nature of everything else.
For audio, the spot-effects are sturdy but not exciting. The music is impressive, but quite repetitive and as such becomes irritating. Put on some of your own tunes and it’s all a lot more fun.
Deadly Sin’s control system is a clone of many other games, and there is little room for innovation in the RPG genre after all these years. There is a young character discovering her destiny, on an epic quest, with a mysterious mentor. There are demons, a slightly stilted love interest, a plague of undead… The game has the odd creative flourish, such as the skills tree which has some interesting abilities at higher levels, and there has been a clear decision to get straight on with the meat of the game rather than the standard opening stages of dull introductory quests. But there is nothing mould-breaking about the game in any respect. At $6.99, however, it represents excellent value of money and is a rewarding game on its own terms.
Before I downloaded the demo, I was interested in the website that displayed lots of anime/manga style graphics. I was expecting some cool and interesting role playing game like the Neophyte series, something that I can loose myself in for at least the duration of the demo. What I got was woefully less and I can only be glad that despite losing precious life minutes, I didn’t have to pay for it.
Why was it so bad? The graphics are simply awful. I can totally understand an independent game having graphics that are not as slick as professional games. But really, the graphics looked like they had been drawn using Microsoft Paint. Bad beyond belief. I almost gave up from the get go. Music next. Okay, it’s a fantasy game so we need some folky, medieval type music. What we got was something played by a hillbilly (no offense to hillbilly’s) using a MIDI player that was made in the 80s. That bad? Yes, that bad. After 2 minutes I was hunting for the volume controls but in my rush to get rid of the sound I resorted to turning my speakers down.
Maybe the actual game itself makes up for bad graphcis and sound. But then again, maybe it doesn’t. After the short intro which explains you are probably a fairy, it’s down to business of self-discovery. How do you do this? By doing rubbish jobs for rubbish money. There is no skill that I could see. At the beginning of the game you choose the type of person you are and from this you can work out what you will be good at. I skip-read the entire intro and still was able to work out where my skills were best placed.
Maybe I’m being too harsh. If this game is aimed at children around 7 years old who have been brought up in a family where pre-Pentium PCs are top notch, wrist watches with calculators are cool and Axel F is dominating the charts, then it might be awesome. Sadly, this is not that time and this game is not awesome.
3 reasons to buy it? Seriously, I can’t think of 1 let alone three. At a push, I would say (1) it’s gentle enough I guess for kids (2) it teaches that hard work is not a bad thing and (3) no, I can’t do it. 2 will have to do.
3 reasons not to buy it? Only three? (1) Bad graphics (2) Bad sound (3) Bad/boring/repetitive game play and this list really could go on.
I hate to be so harsh of independent games, but there are so many better games out there that are made by fans and independent companies that there really is no excuse for this. Rating out of 5 would have to come to a 1 and that’s being generous. Sorry. I tried to like it, but just couldn’t.
Laxius Force is the typical dungeon crawling adventure game. Explore the maze of dungeon for treasure. Fight off monsters to gain experience. Collect items for magical purposes or for money.
Rate 2 out of 5
Overview:
Kivi’s Underworld is yet another reinvention of the stereotypical fantasy based role-playing game where players battle against hordes of enemies such as your typical skeletons and zombies. As players progress through the game, you develop your character’s brawn and magical capabilities in order to defeat more difficult enemies, which often may be reinventions of the same sort of enemies which you encountered at an earlier point in the game.
Game Play: 4/5
The game play of Kivi’s Underworld is what you would expect from a role-playing game, click to move, click to attack, repeat. This format makes the game extremely easy to learn, providing players the opportunity to spend more energy focusing on the plot. The simple yet effective game play makes Kivi’s Underworld ideal to players who may be inexperienced with the role-playing game genre.
Graphics: 4/5
Kivi’s Underworld places the player into a visually appealing environment, but a few aspects of the game prove to degrade the aesthetically appealing graphics. First, I was disappointed with the targeting system which the game uses to allow players to know if they are currently scrolled over an enemy or an object. Scrolling over an enemy for example will result in the enemy being surrounded by a thick red line, letting you know you can click if you want to attack the enemy. The simple bold lines appear in stark contrast to the smooth and polished environment, which takes away from the immersing experience of the game. Secondly, items which players come across throughout the game appear very unpolished and take away from the cohesion of the visual experience of the game.
Sound: 3/5
Suspenseful music and the clanking of swords, the two ingredients of all role-playing games. Kivi’s Underworld lives up to this formula for a generic role-playing game. The voice acting is acceptable, but less than stellar. Overall, the sound met expectations but failed to impress.
Creativity: 2/5
Yet another less than stellar reinvention of a genre which has seen much higher quality games in the past. Had this game came out ten years ago, I would have been impressed with the creativity. The only reason I did not give the creativity a score of 1/5 is because I am hoping the plot provides something fresh for the genre.
Innovation: 1/5
There appear to be no innovative breakthroughs in this game, as the game is a mediocre reproduction of the core role-playing game experience.
Summary: Overall Score of 3/5
Overall I give Kivi’s Underground a score of 3/5. This game may appeal to players who are new to the role-playing genre, and are looking for a game which is easy to learn, and still offers the basic fundamentals of the genre. The graphics provide for an aesthetically appealing experience, and were the strongest aspect of the game. Personally, having been exposed to several more impressive games of the genre in my past, I would not purchase this game.
There should be more video games based on books, really. It would help combat all the daft accusations of games damaging child literacy, and the stories would be better. Nowhere is this clearer than in this new adapatation of The Three Musketeers.
Ever save a kidnapped child while suffering insults from an estranged wife you haven’t seen in ten years? Well as Galahar you most certainly will! Dark Souls II places the player in the role of warrior hero Galahar, who for the last ten years has traveled the world searching for his daughter. Now this may sound perfectly reasonable, except for one small detail – the hero of the story neglected to take his poor wife with him! Upon his return he has to deal with the consequences of leaving abruptly, failing to find his missing daughter, child-stealing bandits, and the ever-increasing threat posed by Anomalies – roaming monsters that ravage villages, and just plain aren’t nice!
The game offers hours of intense enjoyment, not founded upon graphics but a rich storyline that draws the player in. Relying on a very traditional battle system, the protagonists of the story go from one quest to another with each event building off of the previous one. The monsters are easily taken care of with melee attacks while the bosses require every spell the characters have in order to continue the game. In addition to traditional bosses, the player encounters pillars known as Malice Pillars. These pillars help prepare the party for the dangers to come by allowing them to fight monsters that are more difficult than the standard bosses.
One of the few drawbacks to the game is the lack of innovation in the systems of the game itself. For all those who love sub-games in their RPGs, Dark Souls II sadly comes up short. The game is pretty straightforward in terms of what can be done and what can’t be done. This leaves the story of the game pretty linear, limiting the replay value of the game. Though this in no way takes away from the fun generated by believable dialogue and the situations the characters find themselves in. So unless you’re one of those people who can’t focus on one thing for too long, you’ll hardly notice this slight oversight on the developer’s part.
Last but not least, we return to the subject of graphics and sound quality. The types of sounds used in the game are reminiscent of the RPGs that children played during the early- to mid-1990s. You know, the Super Nintendo generation that grew up to become video game designers, among other things. The graphics aren’t that far off either, offering enough of a clear picture to tell what’s going on, but not the highly-detailed images that people find on the current generation of platform video game systems today. All of these factors combined make the game a good buy for players old enough to remember old-school RPGs.
A kidnapped relative, murdered parents, an elderly mentor who turns out not to be a relative at all, strange masked figures killing villagers in the middle of the night, a quest for revenge…it’s another RPG, isn’t it?
What do you get when you mix Japanese school girls, plant-like aliens and RPG elements? Well, you get most of the anime that exists today, really. But you also get Science Girls, a game that roughly resembles said anime in most respects.
I’m pretty sure every RPG player with a love of fantasy has contemplated making their own RPG. The act of creating a whole new world is just too delicious a prospect to ignore, especially if you can sell it to other like-minded players. Aveyond – Gates of Night seems to spring from this idea.
Aveyond has your typical RPG storyline. The descendant of a powerful sorcerer, Mel, has unwittingly given an orb of incredible power to a vampire mage, and she must seek out the orb’s opposite – along with a band of friends – to put a stop to his attempts to plunge the planet into darkness. Lots of crazy adventures ensue along the way.
Laxius Force II is a bizarre experience. I suspect English was not the first language of its creators (“Your lecture of my mind..” is a particular gem) and it seems to have been designed with a handheld gaming console in mind rather than a PC.
