Darkstone

Rating:
Summary: A lot of fun for the low price
Review: One might see this game as a Diablo clone, and it very well may be, but it is deeper and more fun than the original Diablo in many ways. First of all, the graphics are all 3D, which is a step that even Diablo 2 has not taken. The quests are a little more random and non-linear than in either Diablo, making it very replayable. One great feature is the way one player can create two heroes - one to control directly, and the other to be controlled by the computer as a monster-killing ally. In addition to this, the 3D levels have great lighting effects and fighting monsters is really fun.

There are 4 main classes, which are divided into 8 subclasses according to gender, which has a small effect on the characters (for example, females can be archers but males can be assassins). There are 8 skills that each character can learn and improve upon, and these skills are different for different classes. Also, characters get hungry and must be fed, with food bought from the store, found during adventuring, or found using special skills.

I bought the game for $ and was satisfied. I highly reccommend it for the new Amazon.com price or if you can find it at a PC game store for cheaper.

Rating:
Summary: A derivative of Diablo, with some original touches
Review: System on which this was tried out: Pentium III 733 MHz, nVidia TNT 2 Pro, 128 MB RAM, Win98, with a monitor with 1024 x 768 resolution. Hardware acceleration is required.

In this review, I'll only consider Darkstone from the viewpoint of single-player. Darkstone is a fantasy action/adventure game, but along the lines of Diablo rather than Black Isle's AD&D-style Baldur's Gate. I consider Darkstone to be a Diablo derivative; Darkstone's release was after that of the original Diablo but long before that of Diablo II, so it has a different spin than that of Diablo II.

Graphics are much more cartoonlike than those of Diablo, but as a tradeoff the different kinds of monsters really *are* different, instead of just being a few basic types varying only by colour. Some of the monster types: skeletons with varying types of weapons and armour; giant insects (wasps, bees with electrical attacks); bats; rats; snakes; lizardmen; nosferatu/vampires; ratmen (cute, actually) of varying strengths and armament. Very occasionally a dungeon chamber will be full of vicious little chickens. :)

Quests come in two flavors, and each game has a different, random quest mix.
1) A minor quest consists of a townsperson walking up to the player and naming the item to be located (in an appropriate spiel). The quest-assigner exchanges a lump sum in gold for the item.
2) A major quest, on the other hand, has a plot and even a puzzle to solve, and ends with the award of one of the 7 crystals to the player.

Darkstone's graphics have less atmosphere than those of Diablo, but there are a greater variety of enemies and settings, and the player has more freedom to enter higher-level dungeons - of course, after that, it's the player's own fault if he/she is creamed for tackling high-level enemies before the character can cope with them. (On the flip side, the save mechanism allows multiple save files, unlike Diablo, and there's no penalty for dying, something Diablo II adjusted.)

Similar concepts to Diablo: health and mana potions and fountains; magic door spells that gate back to town; monsters can't follow you into town or between levels, and don't respawn once you've cleaned out an area (something Diablo II adjusted); ability to range the countryside rather than just having a dungeon crawl (something Diablo II also picked up); random quest mix (something Diablo II dropped, unfortunately), where the major quests have more eye candy and more mental challenges than Diablo's, at least on the first visit; characters have active and passive skills, something Diablo II also picked up; randomized dungeons, except for the set-piece areas specific to major quests.

Extra concepts: The character must eat and rest, but can pay for lessons in skills as well as practicing on the town training ground. While town is a safe zone, the player can pickpocket town characters - including stealing eggs from a chicken. Items and attacks have a more complex, Diablo II-ish flavor, including poison spells and cursed artifacts - things that can be fixed, for a price. The blacksmith can upgrade as well as repair, buy, and sell weapons. The town usurer is a good idea. Incidentally, as in Diablo II, the player may have a sidekick, but unlike D2, the player can fully control either player character at will.

As for the dungeons themselves, they're more elaborate than those of Diablo, or than several of those in Diablo II - not graphically, but in terms of content: pressure plates to open some doors, teleport pads, doors that open only when switches are thrown in specific sequences. Outside individual dungeons, the map can be used to direct the player character to a specific location.

Some poor play balance aspects: the player will amass HUGE amounts of money, and the usurer doesn't even charge a fee; AIs can't open doors, and hold still once a door closes between you and them, which leaves them at the mercy of a ranged attack.

Annoyances: voice acting ranges from OK to rotten; player can replay *everything* said by any NPC more than 'good morning', but can't sift out just the quests left open; those must be tracked on the player's own time. Consequently, for a game that's been underway for a while, the playback feature on NPC conversation isn't useful.

Rating:
Summary: Bad, bad game, I cried for hours
Review: The game had a few cool features. I liked the fact that you didn't have to remember how to get to different locations, you simply had to visit it once and it was added to a list of destinations for you to pick from. The other cool feature was that it was a game...other than that, it felt like "Get item, kill monsters, go to next level, get items, return with items, kill monsters" The plot (as far as I got, as much as I tried to force myself to continue onward eventually even my self-loathing has a peak) was weak, the NPC's dialogue was horrid...I'm old school in that I actually care about plot in an RPG call me bizzare...if you want a good RPG, go get Might and Magic, or wait for Diablo 2. (though I always did like the M&M's better)

Rating:
Summary: D&D Stlyle Games
Review: The number one thing that attracts me to an RPG is if it has one of four logos.
#1 Forgotten Realms
#2 TSR
#3 SSI
#4 Wizards of the Coast
I am a hard core D&Der from the 70's and wont recommend any RPG title that does not have one of these logos as without it, it means that is not officially D&D nor does it have the D&D rule system in place. I have found that any game that does not have these logos are wimpy at best.

Rating:
Summary: way to much of a Diablo offshoot
Review: There really is no storyline to this game. All you do is go to the dungeon, kill monsters, and come back. THATS IT. There is no real character interaction, no plot development, and no detail in the 5 house town.

the good side- a way to have a little fun and kill something. (may sound twisted, but hey when your bored, it may be the only thing to do). There are some cool items to buy and find, and the unlimited views are amazing. You can literally have ANY view you want of the character. Plus, the loading time is short.

I suggest you buy this game if you liked Diablo, but if you want a REAL RPG then get Baldur's gate or Ultima Collection.

Rating:
Summary: way to much of a Diablo offshoot
Review: There really is no storyline to this game. All you do is go to the dungeon, kill monsters, and come back. THATS IT. There is no real character interaction, no plot development, and no detail in the 5 house town.

the good side- a way to have a little fun and kill something. (may sound twisted, but hey when your bored, it may be the only thing to do). There are some cool items to buy and find, and the unlimited views are amazing. You can literally have ANY view you want of the character. Plus, the loading time is short.

I suggest you buy this game if you liked Diablo, but if you want a REAL RPG then get Baldur's gate or Ultima Collection.

Rating:
Summary: You get what you pay for
Review: This game was originally released for 10 dollars. Almost everything about it is pulled straight from Diablo and is not quite as good. Though this game has a few things about it that are interesting, and can be enjoyable to some people, I would just skip this game and go for Diablo 2.

Rating:
Summary: A cool way to pass the time
Review: Usually I'm an adventure game fanatic at heart, but this game was bought for me as a gift and I found myself greatly caught up on it as soon as I installed it on my computer.

The game is very much a dungeon bash situation. You create a character and assign them attributes, buy them weapons, and then go out to the local dungeon and pound every monster you meet, bather up as much treasure as you can, and then buy better weapons so you can kill even more monsters.

While you're in town the villagers will tell you about items that have been stolen that you can find and return for rewards, or people who ask for your help in killing a particularly nasty monster, or they tell you a bit about the big creature you'll find yourself facing at the end of the game. Your ultimate goal will be to gather several crystals together to gain an item that will allow you to take on the evil dragon lord at the end of the game, but there's dozens of other quests to keep you occupied meanwhile.

One of the most innovative features to the game is that it maps each area and dungeon differently for every new game you start, plus it juggles the quests around so that no one game is exactly like another. It was an interesting detail that wasn't necessary, but was nice of the programmers to add.

All in all, I was quite pleased with this game. There's times when one gets bored with confusing puzzle games and you just want to run around in a dungeon and hack up monsters. Darkstone offers adventure by the bucketload, and will hold your attention for awhile.

Rating:
Summary: Darkstone, aka Diablo 1.5
Review: When Blizzard released its mega-hit Action/RPG hybrid Diablo in 1996, it was gobbled up with enthusiastic acclaim from critic and gamer alike, with good reason. It evolved the addictive dungeon-crawling formula from Gauntlet with gloomy, gothic architecture to create one of the most satisfying romps to straddle both sides of the Action/RPG fence in years, and shared distinction with Daggerfall in bringing CRPGing out of its regressive slump in the last few years. After the initial deluge, it's odd that most other gaming companies out there were slow to carpe diem with their own bandwagon products, given their the propensity to create "me-too" games if it follows a successful formula. So, this sensory input sluggishly trudged through the nervous system of the gaming industry until finally, in late 1999, it hit the brains of the rival CEOs, and out marched the clones. Darkstone lead the pack with Revenant and Nox soon to follow. It's a good thing that the most derivative of the three, Darkstone, was released first, because come this summer when Diablo II will be released (uh, so the grapevine says), this franchise will definitely be damaged goods.

Darkstone is SO derivative, down to the color of the potions, names of equipment, character classes, stats, and mouse controls, that if I'd been handed this game without documentation on a nondescript CD I'd have thought it was "Diablo 3D." I challenge you to find a reviewer who DOESN'T make a Diablo allusion with this game. Even developer DSI is self-conscious about this, its very manual instructing gamers at the beginning that if they "are already familiar with this type of game," an obvious reference to Diablo, they can move on to appendixes outlining the major differences in structure from its predecessor. Even banner advertisements for Darkstone that I was privy too touted "All you former Diablo players searching for a new home, your search is over." There is something refreshing about a gaming company that admits that its product is nothing more than a stylistic rip-off.

The best way to review Darkstone would be to speak about how it in fact DIFFERS from Diablo. First off, in single-player mode you have the option of playing simultaneously with two characters, with the computer controlling one. This teamwork makes progress easier, and AI used is decent enough with a Warrior or Thief. In Town (yes, that's its name, "Town," DSI must have rightly assumed that naming it would be redundant, after all, one of the most oft typed phrases I saw on Diablo's Battle.Net was "see u in town"), in addiction to the mandatory blacksmith/witch/healer/innkeeper present there was also a banker for hoarding all that extra loot taking up space in your inventory, and anything that you purchase that exceeds what's in your pocket is extracted from your account (medieval debiting! How progressive!). There is also a Skills Trainer, who trains you in, well, skills, and various tiers of ability, that operate much the same way as spells except they don't tax your stats any. Some skills passively assist your character, such as "Trade" and "Perception" which endow your hero with the ability to haggle merchant prices and detect trapped objects, other skills like "Forester" or "Theft" have to be activated. The well-disciplined and learned character is a huge advantage on the road; I got in the habit or regularly using "Concentration," "Meditation," "Orientation," "Prayer," and "Lycanthropy" in-play, which was a huge boon to my combat skills, as well as using others such as "Repair" and "Recharging" to increase the value of surplus equipment I'd find before pawning off. There is also a feature to allow you to automatically backtrack previously visited areas, allowing the computer to take care of a lot of needless traveling to and fro in dungeons and on the surface world. There are a couple of irksome contributions unique in Darkstone's re-treading of old ground, however. One is the inclusion of hunger and aging of your characters, giving the game a condensed timeframe feel to it, but to what end? A tad of grounding realism to your careers as evil-smiting heroes? Luckily, there is usually enough food and anti-aging potions down the road. Two, prices tend to be extraordinarily inflated compared to Diablo, at rates 200-400% of what you'd expect. 10,000 gold just ain't what it used to be, pardner. And naturally, Darkstone's engine, bestiary, quests, and dungeon-design have been re-modeled and expanded from Diablo's, with 32 dungeons to Diablo's 16, and a plethora of randomized quests to go with them, even if they mainly fall in the banality of retrieving the <art/craft> of <person/place/virtue> or killing the <evil foozle> of ages.

I enjoyed digging up the nostalgia of Diablo's glory days in Darkstone, and played it nightly with a friend of mine for about a month before the novelty wore off. However, that's still only a third of the time I devoted to Diablo. Simply put, Diablo was a little more fun that Darkstone. Diablo had the feel of a melancholy AD&D Ravenloft adventure, Darkstone was more along the line of a clichéd D&D dungeon-crawl. Diablo's Trinsic was a morose and haunted country village bathed in crepuscular dusk, Darkstone's garden-variety "Town" is a fort enclosing a pen of adventurer shops in bright daylight. Diablo had a thematically consistent ensemble of demons and undead, Darkstone has a goofy collage of goblinoids, anti-heroes, and creepy-crawlies---you thought Monty Python's killer rabbit was a joke? Meet its rodent cousin. Even Darkstone's musical score sounds like a banal remake of Diablo's. Drak even makes a bona fide Evil Speech (tm) at the end of the last level before commencing battle.

Darkstone is a very serviceable modern upgrade to Diablo, with some welcome additions to the award-winning formula. It's worth looking into if you're a starved Action/RPG fan or if you want to relive some of that late-night hack-and-slashing with some friends. Just entertain no illusions about what it is, and what it isn't.