by: Dameon White

January 01, 2009

As aforementioned, the creatures in this game are arguably the coolest part of the game. Fighting them on the other hand is what sort of detracts from the experience. For starters, your arsenal for the most part is pretty basic throughout the game and mostly just consists of melee weapons like axes and other firearms. The game wants you to use the environment in a lot of situations to kill things, but doesn’t make this apparent in anyway, shape or form and figuring it out will literally happen at random unless you’re reading this review. For example, see a creature that’s surrounded by fire and try to lead it to water or shoot a pipe (if you can tell what the pipe is) or do something of that nature. You will spend a bit of time wasting ammo on creatures when there’s a much easier way to do it.

Remember that cool-sounding sigil branding on your I mentioned earlier? It’s not really that cool. As you destroy creatures they will release their energy, which is referred to as Animus in the game. With the Animus, you can leech their remaining power and absorb it into yourself, which can be used to either heal you or release it in the form of a damaging power. I couldn’t help but smell a big whiff of Bioshock when I first saw this, but I’m not going to knock the game for taking inspiration from the likes of such a phenomenal title. What I am going to knock though is how limited this power is. You can’t upgrade it and you won’t really find any new powers. You basically just absorb, heal or use the power. It’s pretty weak if you ask me and only gets a bit more frustrating when you soon realize that many of the creatures are immune to the power anyway, which forces you to figure out environmental triggers or waste ammunition.

Graphically, the game isn’t anything more than what equates to what I’m sure are the default settings of the Unreal Engine. You can easily tell that using the Unreal Engine in this case was more to attempt to cover up a lack of development talent (or dollars) and to get the game to look at least somewhat marketable. However, it’s easily identifiable that the developers didn’t spend too much time with the engine, as there’s an exuberant amount of lag and framerate drops throughout the game. Also worth noting is that I couldn’t help but feel that werewolves were given a bit more development time than practically everything else in the game due to them being noticeably more detailed than virtually the rest of the game.

If there was anything that I did like about the game, it would be its artistic design. I quite enjoyed the fact that depending on where you were or the setting you were in the game could take on an almost classic Wolfenstein feel and despite the lacking graphical detail all of the creatures look like you’d expect them to.

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At the conclusion of the game it’s easy to tell that there are sequels planned and despite the low score of this game, with more development time or possibly a stronger team this particular title could have been better and shows promise if it gets into the proper hands. For now, though, this is one experience I can’t quite recommend unless you’re really into the whole myth and magic or literally have nothing left to play.

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