darkangel

Of course it’s fun to play too, once you get past the mesmerizing title screen.

The game is pretty forgiving about getting your character accidentally killed off. It seems like whether you’ve been near a resurrection point recently or not, you won’t actually lose anything when you die, such as experience, or abilities. I could be wrong about that, though.

There are several touches of realism that make you feel more like you’re part of an actual world than a game. While you’re walking around a town, you can see other people walking around too, which isn’t all that unusual for this type of game, but you can also hear their conversations with each other, which is. You can walk into a cemetery, and of course loot the crypts, but also read the epitaphs, which are numerous and quite funny. One aspect that I like is that random enemies, such as wandering bandits, that you encounter while traversing the map won’t necessarily attack you right away. Sometimes they will, but sometimes they’ll just keep walking or just stand still until you get quite close. This gives you a chance to fire a ranged weapon at them before they’ve even begun to think about attacking. This feels more realistic to me than constantly being under attack whether you can see any enemies on your screen or not, which is sometimes the case in a game like Champions of Norrath.

Since the game is an RPG with a complex set of skills and combat arts, I think it would have been friendlier to co-op players if the game allowed more than one person into their character control screen at a time. It’s easy to spend quite a bit of time in there, and meantime the other player is basically twiddling their thumbs (and keeping half an eye on the background to see if either character is suddenly being attacked!) Of course this is not a problem in online co-op mode.

One aspect that I haven’t gotten into yet at all is the mounted option. Apparently you can find a horse or similar type of beast and ride it around. I haven’t played any other RPGs that have this feature, other than as a temporary scripted part of certain levels such as the lava runner in Champions, so I’m looking forward to trying that out.

There is also a religious aspect to the game, whereby each character chooses a deity, who provides a “divine gift” in the form of an ultra-powerful (and very slow to recharge) spell. There are statues to the various deities placed at temples in some of the settlements, and you can interact with these statues, but I haven’t figured out yet whether there’s a concept of a tangible relationship between the character and the deity a la Nethack.

Overall a fantastic game. I can’t wait to play it some more!