Find out what happens when you mix Diablo, Arcanum, and tedium into your alchemy set.
Playing through one campaign of Silverfall, a French-made Diablo-clone that has a twist of Arcanum, reminded me of getting through a viewing of Equilibrium. That is, they both have boring-bordering-on-terrible beginnings, but once you make your way through a significant chunk of the product, once the gun kata or the steam-powered dragon make an appearance, the quality increases a bit, moving from terrible and into merely mediocre. Sometimes even decent.
My name is... Archmage. I am an... archmage
After creating a character (human, elf, troll, or goblin, with minor visual tweaks), Silverfall's story begins with a tutorial. There, you play as "Archmage" (yes, that's his name and his title, and the dialogue switches between these uses repeatedly) as he tries to fend off a zombie invasion in the city of Silverfall. The city soon falls and you then step into the shoes of the character you created.
Basic gameplay is Diablo-style; click on a baddie to hit him repeatedly until he dies. In-between monster-slaying, you fulfill little sidequests like "go find these lost fools" or "go pick up a copy of an exam for me to cheat with"; besides loot, sidequests can either determine your alignment (between Nature and Technology, which influences available quests and the general feel of the rebuilt Silverfall) or earn you a companion (an NPC party member; you can have two at a time). But right when you start walking around to get quests and kill for loot is when one of Silverfall's biggest flaws just up and smacks you in the face: the terrible mini-map.
What makes the mini-map particularly useless is that the "helpful" little arrow in its middle doesn't indicate which direction the character faces, instead, it indicates the camera's own frequently awkward orientation. This means it's possible, and often, to be moving in a completely different direction than intended due to how the camera is rotated. Once you wrap your head around this baffling decision, it sort of becomes something you get used to. Too bad that little sliver of "okay, I've adapted to this" quickly evaporates when you either click on a piece of terrain that blocks your path, forcing the characters to take some weird alternate path that combines with a camera swinging out by itself, or try to run away from some nasty spider mob and in the heat of the moment, forgetting how the camera works, you end up totally lost instead. Additionally, not only does the map reveal where nearby enemies are, but most of those enemies are hidden in clumps of two or three and only emerge/respawn when you get near them. So the exploration boils down to either triggering nuggets of enemies or outright avoiding them.
Infinite Possibilities
Depending on your character build, fighting those nuggets of enemies is either extremely easy or obscenely annoying. There's a dazzling array of skills scattered across multiple trees. There aren't any classes, and skill requirements are usually based on how many points are applied in previous skills on the tree (or character level). Add the ability to respec (with a cost), and the game feels pretty flexible at first. That is, until you realize that the only viable character builds are ranged, magic-user, and melee with lycanthropy. Playing as a pure melee loner is a quick way to die a lot, as enemies love to gang up on you with the slightest hint of aggro (surviving as a melee fighter requires the lycanthropy skill, the healer companion to supply you with fresh life, and another companion to soak up some hits a bit). Put some points into ranged weapon skills, and you gain some valuable crowd control skills which makes things a bit more balanced. Rolling a magic-user basically activates the "I win!" mode, as spells deal devastating damage from far away, and for the few times the enemies survive your fire or lightning assault and then surround you, the freezing spells will make any survivors into easy targets.
Note that I described builds in terms of how they attack, and not between the Nature and Technology skill trees (which the game wants you to do). That's because the two skill trees are more alike than different. Sure, Nature lets you turn into a werewolf (or wererat or werelion or werebear depending on your race), but that's the biggest difference. Otherwise, the two trees have variations of the same powers; "wild marks" and "implants" both boost stats; "Nature's Help" and "Mechanical Slave" both conjure a temporary extra party member. Shooting jets of steam and then irradiating someone is a lot like shooting a handful of bees and inflicting rust on them.
Slogging through the beginning of the game -- before you can allocate points to the good skills or fulfill the quest requirements for companions -- can take its toll on you, too. A typical occurrence is getting lost from misreading your map and then getting jumped and killed. Then, in a throwback to EverQuest and UO, you get to do a corpse run. The only way to prevent your currently-equipped gear from being stripped off and stored at your tombstone where you died is to pony up insurance money (which increases after every death). Using a melee character and watching my insurance go from 200 gold go up to about 1000 gold was pretty annoying.
Besides killing you, the enemies also level up with you. This was made blatantly obvious when my level eight character hit nine, and the little eight above the head of the zombie I was fighting instantly became a nine. To be fair, there is an upper cap for each region (i.e. baddies near the newbie town stop scaling after level 10 or so), but in general, the mobs are going to be roughly equal to you as you progress, diminishing the feeling of character growth.
Grudging Appreciation
All of these quirks and glitches annoyed me greatly during the first ten hours or so. But once I got a viable character build with some decent gear and started getting deeper into the single-player campaign (it takes about 20-25 hours total), the quest got pretty decent. Taking that character online was sort of enjoyable, since multiplayer is either co-op through the main campaign, or co-op but with the main questline removed (sidequests are still there); what made me go back to single-player was the constant lag in every game I hopped into. But I did honestly got some enjoyment out of gearing up my character to look like the female Rocketeer, and watching her switch from stabbing dudes in the face to zapping them with balls of radiation. I started to appreciate a gameworld where druids bicker with zeppelin pilots, and where a troll noble has been brainwashed and her mansion becomes a dungeon filled with bizarre suicide bomb dolls and steam-powered dragons. It's hard not to like goblin-piloted robots.
Call it either a harsh learning curve or maybe a case of Stockholm Syndrome, but I thought Silverall ultimately turned out to be a pretty okay meld of Diablo and Arcanum. It's just too bad that getting to that point of being okay with it was so aggravating.
©2007, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Click your way into mediocrity.
Acquiring more powerful items has some sort of mystic connection to the human spirit, it seems. For whatever reason, fans of action-RPGs will subject themselves to thoughtless, repetitive activities for hours at a time only to get another point of fire damage on their weapon, or get a black hood instead of a white one. If this weren't the case, a game like Diablo would never have succeeded. Silverfall, like Diablo, is all about getting more powerful gear by highlighting an enemy, clicking, and repeating until your finger gets tired, you pass out, or the game pisses you off. Silverfall, the latest Diablo clone out on the market, has many qualities that may drive you to flirt with the uninstall option. It's an utterly mindless mouse clicking adventure with quests and characters fresh off the clich� assembly line, a perpetually aggravating camera system, inconsistent movement pathing, poor graphical performance, and some noticable bugs. On the bright side, it does offer a decent action-RPG foundation, loads of items to acquire and skills to learn, as well as a multiplayer mode, assuming you can get it to work.
Generic might be the word that stands out in your mind while acclimating to Silverfall's game world. We've seen Trolls, Orcs, Human, and Elves countless times before. We've seen swamp, forest, desert, and cavern maps even more. That's exactly what you get in this game, as you pick one of the four races you've played countless times before to adventure across terrain you've already seen. It's not all Tolkien-esque high fantasy, however. A major theme in the game is the interplay between nature and technology, and you'll see such ideas manifest as industrial revolution era structures in towns and across the landscape.
Since narrative for quests of main and side varieties is about as engaging as a pebble, this game would require some interesting items to drop from enemies to maintain your attention. Thankfully there are quite a few, and the visual variety and differing effects are enough to keep you hunting around at least for a little while.
Companions can be recruited to expedite the monster slaughter and, depending on their character skills, instructed to focus on healing, combat, or a mix of the two, and follow instructions rather well. They can also be equipped with items you grab off the ground and potions, adding to their appeal.
While the map can be convenient, you'll constantly be struggling with the camera to orient yourself properly. For whatever reason, the minimap displays an arrow over your character showing which way the camera is currently pointing, not the way your character is facing. As a result, you'll be in a near constant state of camera tweaking to get your character movement, camera orientation, and quest destination coordinated, an issue made worse by the fact that the camera continues swinging around after you've released Mouse 3. You can click on the minimap to move your character around instead, but once you get out into the fields the enemy density is too high, requiring you to make more precise movement clicks on the main screen. Add in some occasionally erratic character pathing and you'll likely be touched by the urge to punch your monitor.
Dying in Silverfall is handled similarly to Diablo. Taking too many hits respawns you in a town and forces you to retrieve your stuff back at the spot you died. Your tombstone's location is recorded in the minimap to facilitate recovery. If you die on the way out to get your stuff, the game spawns another tombstone, and you can tell the game to highlight either one through your quest log if you so choose. To avoid this recovery hassle, it's possible to insure yourself at a town, but you probably won't be doing this every time because of the inconvenience of trying to find the proper NPC. What's really perplexing about this system is why your armor and weapons aren't auto-equipped on your character when you retrieve a tombstone. More often than not, you die at a spot where enemies are mulling about, meaning you're going to take a few hits to reclaim your items. Instead of the game reequipping you automatically, you need to instead open your inventory and reapply all the items manually, leaving you particularly vulnerable to attack in the process since you'll be wearing no or at least weakened armor.
Though there are many parts of Silverfall sure to frustrate, such as the physics system that permits items dropped from monsters to tumble irrecoverably into nearby pits and ponds, the game at least got the core action-RPG elements right. As silly as the concept is, the game manages to generate that addictive urge to find better equipment, topple more powerful enemies, and then hope those enemies drop better equipment to defeat even more powerful enemies. To add some variety, the game gives you to the options to reorient your character's statistics and abilities whenever you like (assuming you've got the cash), which allows you to experience all the game has to offer without starting all over again. Silverfall can be pretty, even if the environments are generic, and the areas are populated with some interesting looking creatures. Unfortunately it doesn't perform all that well, especially if you try to use the over-the-shoulder camera view. We experienced a fairly regular and sometimes major hit to the framerate, in addition to extremely lengthy loading times.
©2007, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved