Recent reviews by Smokescreen

Re-release of one of the best action RPGs available. Greatly improved graphics, rebalanced skills, bugs fixed. Co-op network play is back!

This game should have more negative reviews, so I will write one.

There are no berry bushes. There are no flint rocks lying around. There are no fish in the water. There is no tap root on the ground. There is no animal that walks around, yet somehow they can still end up in your snare. The entire game is spent aiming at blank looking tiles, using skills like "look for food", "catch a fish", or "find a flint stone", and hoping that you will get one. There is no way to visually see where any of these things are. The entire game world feels empty and desolate, because you cannot actually see any of the things that you are going to have to go gather. For example, you can gather the berries from anywhere, so there isn't even incentive to find a location that has say... many berry bushes, because the berries come from searching any grass tile.

Basically, you are running around an empty world, and you are expected to imagine all the things that you are interacting with. Someone called it a progress bar simulator, and that is pretty accurate. I guess while the progress bars go by slowly you are supposed to imagine the thing you are interacting with. Like imagine my guy wondering if there are some berry bushes over here, and then when he finds some I can imagine that some are sitting there on the tile. I'm glad the trees at least made it into the visible world, because that would be funny if you had to go around trying to cut down trees, and you couldn't even see them. Its really not that far away from that.

oh... and a 45 minute load time? hahahahahahhaha. since when has that become acceptable?

GLITCHY TERRAIN that is constantly popping in and out makes this game unplayable.

why are people so stubborn to admit how glitchy this is? this has nothing to do with your machine or your settings, it is their voxel engine doing something weird. you would think they would get this working before adding all the other gameplay stuff.

the most annoying part is that the physics of the terrain are completely tied to the graphics, so its not just like the textures arent loading, its more like you walk onto the side of a hill, and then suddenly the hill disappears under you and you fall down. or, you will be walking along a flat field and the ground will raise up infront of you by a foot, then when you go to jump up the step, the loading will catch up and the step will disappear. but, if you try to just run straight full speed, you will hit these steps. this was 100x worse online, mostly because the other players had modified the terrain quite a bit and the loading is even slower. this leads to things like standing in a flat field, and then 10 seconds later the ground disappears, and you fall into a several hundred foot deep quarry that the players have dug up.

this could be some sort of LOD on the terrain, but it seems more like the world or map is stored as an initial state, and then all the modifications to it are stored separately, and when you apply the modifications to the terrain you get the current state of things. so when you out pace the server or your machine's ability to update the terrain fast enough, you will see the terrain how it would be without any modifications until the modifications get applied. maybe this is how they implement their voxel system, thinking that the total amount of changes is a lot less data to keep track of than just ALL the data at once, but its not able to apply those changes fast enough in real time. your graphics card would not be able to help speed this up in any way, it would just be up to your processor. the solution isn't to get a more powerful processor, it is to implement this system in a more efficient way that doesn't rely on updating data constantly on the fly. you must consider both the size of the data as well as the speed of processing that data in real time.

i mean this idea of a huge open landscape that can all be terraformed and modified is not a new idea by any means, its just one that hasn't been feasible to implement because of these very reasons. this is also why minecraft is so blocky, it is not because the developer just loved blocks, it is what made it possible to have such a large modifiable world. the big AAA companies have probably prototyped this sort of smooth modifiable terrain thing every few years, but they wouldn't dare release something so glitchy, so the idea probably gets scrapped every time.

that is the main difference between indie and AAA: the indie dev doesn't prototype. they just blindly move forward until they find themselves in a hole that is impossible to dig themselves out of, because they didn't realize early enough that it simply wasn't possible to do what they were trying to do, at least not without some innovative solutions. that is the whole point of prototyping, to figure out how to make things work, or if they will even work, before you spend a bunch of time polishing it.

up until very recently, it was not possible to just implement games however you wanted. it usually required lots of little tricks and ways to get the maximum possible efficiency out of the machine. more time was spent figuring out how to make ideas work, than just coming up with the ideas, and often the ideas had to be changed or were severely limited by what was even possible to implement.

these guys come along and think they can just "oh then we will have completely modifiable terrain, mountains you can level with dynamite, player buildings, lots of planets to visit, space, chainsaw battles in space, ya, definitely that, and all the animals will be intelligent, and every rock will be persistent... why didn't anyone else think of these things, we are gonna be rich!!"

That is why I would never recommend this game, because even if it is alpha, and even if this is just a shell of the potential game it can be, that potentially great game will never be implemented by such unread amateurs.

An often overlooked gem among ARPGs. Mythology themed levels, monsters, items, and story. A great skill system that lets you combine multiple skill trees and abilities to create your unique blend of hero. You can be a shield slamming summoner with some healing spells if you want. The maps are large and mostly outdoors, and are all connected, where you can actually run from one village to the next, although still mostly linear (can't run anywhere but the next village). Lots of attention to detail in this game, with small things like monsters actually wearing the armor and weapon models for what they have equipped, and then dropping them when they die. I highly recommend this game to fans of ARPGs, its one of the best available, even today.