Chezni already reviewed this, so I’ll spare you the details.  Suffice to say that as a Source-based RPG, Dark Messiah isn’t bad.  Here’s an analogy to explain: I recently watched a movie called Hudson Hawk, starring Bruce Willis.  It was an interesting movie – sort of a cross between Die Hard and The Fifth Element.  It wasn’t the best movie ever (and it wasn’t as good as either Die Hard or The Fifth Element), but it tried something new and was an overall decent movie with a couple great scenes.  In the same way, Dark Messiah isn’t bad (though the running animations are hilariously bad) – it has some interesting interaction with your environment (kick everything).  It wasn’t terribly long or unique plot-wise, but at least it tried something new.  It scrapes its way into Tier One because it isn’t Risen and because you can kick everything (though the platforming is still terrible).  My only real problem with it is its serious fascination with spiders.  So.  Many.  Spiders.

And, because Chezni took the dark path: I took the light path.  Interestingly, I found the succubus’ voice annoying (though occasionally amusing) and your companion likable but underdeveloped.  Dark Messiah definitely falls into the trap of “female interest likes you because the plot says so.”  There is practically no development for Leanna (and the Succubus is mostly a tutorial voice), which was a bit disappointing.  They really could have done quite a bit with both of those characters as they follow you on your adventures, but then the game would need to also be twice as long (which would not be a bad thing).

 

Nevertheless, as for my endings:

Yeah…they’re all pretty much the same.  The only difference is that whats-her-name is with you instead of the Succubus.  I mean, she doesn’t tempt you to rule the world.  But the no-succubus demon-father ending is exactly the same as the one Chezni mentioned with the succubus.  The “good” ending (with Leanna and re-chaining your father) is equally disappointing – perhaps more so since the narrator essentially says “and the fate is still unknown” – so your entire effort was for naught.

Ah well.  I can’t say I didn’t enjoy my time, or that I didn’t wish I could spend some more – which is why it stays in Tier One.

So I don’t have any fancy screenshots for this one, but I had to throw my two cents in here along with Lepcis’s, because he brought up some good points. For what it is, Deadcore is a fantastic game certainly deserving of Tier 1. It’s fast, it’s smooth, it has tons of paths to choose from and its five levels are more than enough to keep you entertained, especially if you’re going for some of those top scores (although level 4 can still go to the place of fiery burning). If you couldn’t tell from our Deadcore contest, we had a friendly competition to see if we could beat each other’s times, all the while sharing our pathing to collaborate to find a faster and faster route through the level.

While I’ve loved speedrunning as a concept for many years and have watched no small number of them (what game-lover hasn’t), Deadcore was the first one that I got into hands-on. The experience was great and it really opened my eyes to many facets of speedrunning. One that really stuck out to me was that the thrill of the run didn’t come from the prospect of beating a high score time, but instead from beating your own best time.

Ultimately though, it has awakened me to what makes a “good” speedrunning game. Take for instance Zelda OoT. One of Nintendo’s most beloved titles, this game has been speedran to death. In fact, it’s gotten so ridiculous that last I checked, the fastest time involved messing with variables so that the use of Queen Ghoma’s door instantly won you the game. While from a technical perspective and possibly from a fan’s perspective, this is very entertaining. However, from a gameplay or speedrunning standpoint, it’s not that interesting. After all, where’s the contest? Will the judge of who is a better OoT runner be who can subtly input the variables switches ever-so-slightly faster so that they have a .01 second better time? This isn’t really that interesting to the player or the viewer once the concept has been understood and ultimately fails to capture just what OoT is all about.

In line with what Lepcis was saying about the RNG within Deadcore. The cubes are an RNG that produces inconsistent results. Jump pads (while technically not RNG) are so imprecisely manipulatable that they become an unreliant method of traveling through the game–and yet, if you want to get the fastest time, you must make a run at the level hundreds (if not thousands) of times so that you can “get lucky” and nail all of the ridiculously precise “bugs” of the game to get the perfect time. Slope-dashing and Super/Mega Jumping are interesting ideas, but as they were not really intended to be part of the game (and are so difficult to pull off consistently) that they just turn the game into a set of variable manipulations instead of executing strategies related to the purpose of the game’s initial intent (just like the problem with OoT). Not to mention the fact that a slope-dash into Mega Jump on the pad after the door on Level 1 skips most of the level. If that’s the case, what’s the point in the level existing at all? This was a big reason Lepcis and I outlawed Mega Jumping.

It’s not that Deadcore developers did nothing. They removed rocket-jump-chaining (an even more notorious bug) in order to make the game more competitive. I feel though that within reason, if a game is to truly devote itself to speedrunning, then no bug or feature of the game should completely override or remove other parts of the game unless it does so within the expected and encouraged mechanics of the game. I do not blame speedrunners at all for searching for, using and abusing glitches within games in order to accomplish a faster time–I merely feel that a pure speedrun game would be constantly updated to remove these exploits until eventually what you were left with was a game that you truly had to play and the victor of “best time” would go to those that understood the game and its entirety the best, not just the person who could macro a Mega Jump script.

Steam Link

 

First Impression Review

Last I left off (just yesterday) I shared my feelings on D&D:D’s success as a Real-Time Fantasy Adaptation hack and slash game. A mere 5 hours into the game, I find myself at the ending, not particularly surprised by the short game but not necessarily left with a feeling of having my time wasted. The plot is simple, rushed and not important, so we’ll start with that first to get it out of the way.

 

–Spoiler Alert–

As the introduction would let you know, you play as a member of a group of adventurers summoned by Lorin Aria (presumably a cleric) who implores the party to destroy Rezlus’s tower. Rezlus, being a crazy wizard who worships the god Bane, is planning on destroying Daggerdale. The game kicks off underground with the Dwarves, where you run around doing various odd-quests largely involving goblins in order to gain their aid to allow you access to the tower. If you don’t like being underground in dark environments, you had better get used to it since you’ll be underground and in caves for for most of the game.

 

 

Eventually, after appeasing the side-quest gods, the Dwarves manage to sneak you into Rezlus’s tower, whereupon you are immediately captured by Tieflings and forced to fight in a gladiator pit alongside some “friendly” human brigands. Eventually the brigands team up with the heroes and after repelling multiple Tiefling attacks, they establish a base in the area. The third leg of the journey involves gaining the “trust” of a group of Zents (a race apparently even less trustworthy than the Drow) and they agree to open a portal that allows access to Rezlus at the top of his tower. Atop the tower, the four groups (Dwarves, Brigands, Zents and your party) engage Rezlus and his army, eventually forcing his hand to summon a red dragon.

 

 

Weakening the dragon and finishing off Rezlus, Rezlus commands the red dragon with his dying breath to burn Daggerdale to the ground. With no other choice, the party leaps off the tower and on to the back of the dragon, where you must climb up its back and eventually plunge your weapon into the dragon’s eye, ending its flight.

 

 

Teleported back to the top of the tower by Lorin Aria (the cleric from the beginning) she begins to thank the heroes, when Nezra, the leader of the Zents puts a blade in her back. Nezra thanks the heroes for dispatching Rezlus, but informs them that if their intent is to stop the destruction of Daggerdale, they will have to kill her and every last Zent, since it is her goal to take over the tower and the surrounding area. The game ends on a cliff-hanger, with the Zent army pouring into the tower from below, and the four party members preparing for another campaign of combat.

 

 

While the plot of D&D:D succeeds in moving the game along quickly, there are some big problems with it. First off, about 60% of the game is spent with the Dwarves doing their quests. If the game was about 20 hours long, 3 hours per section of the game would be perfect–long enough to get to know the area its problems, but not too long to make the quest-givers and their setting stale. In a 5-hour game though, it just makes the last two people groups you encounter feel rushed. The time spent with the brigands and Zents is so short that it makes me think that either the developer’s time was mismanaged, or funding was cut and they had to rush the game out unfinished.

 

 

Problem #2 with the plot is the cliffhanger ending–it’s lazy and stupid. We all know there’s not going to be a sequel to this game. We all know that the cliffhanger wasn’t used to be thought-provoking. It was used as a desperate last hurrah to create some kind of excitement or interest within the game before it finally petered out. This kind of cliffhanger use isn’t appreciated at all by any intelligent player and it only robs the player of their deserved victory. Ultimately, the adventure feels pointless.

 

 

Generally though, we play a hack & slash to mash a couple buttons, slay hordes of monsters and feel good about ourselves, and on this front D&D:D is pretty strong. When I wrote in my first impression there’s enough selection to create distinction” I may have been a tad optimistic. While there is a nice handful of skills that you’ll acquire along in your adventure, it’s more that the “choice” is in the one skill that you choose not to obtain when you level up, since there aren’t enough skills to really diversify class style. The level bar is pretty low as well. I ended the game at level 8 and from what I can tell, about level 10 is where most of the skill progression cuts out, making replayability (even in the new-game + mode) not that viable. That being said, I loved rolling around, bopping creatures with several flavors of arrow skills and managing my equipment to my tastes (movement speed and rolling cooldown to the max!).

 

 

In spite of any negatives, I feel that the game is still worth Tier 1. Why? Well because what little we get is still good. Would I prefer more skills? Yes. Would I like a longer game? Sure. But did I still have fun? Yes, and ultimately that is a large point of playing a game in the first place. In some ways it made me think back to days spent playing Golden Axe, especially Golden Axe: The Revenge of Death Adder, what with riding the back of a dragon at the end. Now that I think of it, Knights of the Round, a game similar to Golden Axe even had a shallow leveling up system that capped out somewhere in the mid-teens. If you look at D&D:D more along these lines, it’s length and shallow complexity is very reminiscent of the old adventure games–games that you would plug and play with your friends for a couple hours, beat, feel accomplished and depart from with a feeling of good times.

 

 

That’s probably where this game rests the strongest. It’s not a great game, it’s not a quality game and it’s not a long game, but if you have five hours where you want to go out, kill some monsters, grab some treasure–and you perhaps have 3 other friends with you to play local–then this could be a lot of fun. Just don’t invest yourself too strongly in it, as it’s not deep enough to warrant doing so. I still stand that I had a good time, and I definitely recommend it to anyone with time to waste on a decent hack & slash or even those wanting to break into the genre due to D&D:D’s simplicity.

Steam Link