Dungeon crawling hack and slash action RPG? I’m positive there’s bound to be an actual term for this genre but I’m not privy to it, what with being a casual fan of it. With heavy hitters in the genre being a bit too overbearing with the loot and a little too time consumptive with the grinding, can an Xbox Live Arcade title be the perfect solution for those of use wanting an easy pick up and play version?
Short answer is no, but that isn’t to say it’s a bad game, it’s just very average. With other similar games already available on the Arcade (though granted in short demand), bluntly put RAW just doesn’t bring anything to the table that means you should play it instead of the competition, often in fact forgetting to bring certain things in the first place meaning it can be seen as a lesser choice.
While the game itself does control well enough, with the movement and combat being easy to use and comfortably natural, there is a distinct lack of features we’ve come to expect. Taking the movement, while being able to move in any direction is always nice, this is where RAW begins and ends its range of motion. Being unable to dodge in a game such as this is almost criminal, especially when you take into account the sheer amount of enemies RAW will throw at you simultaneously, often trapping you inside a circle of them unable to dodge or escape, often leading to cheap deaths. This is often a cause of having to stop and change direction to attack. Rather than being able to attack in multiple directions, or being able to easily lock on to an enemy to back away while attacking, leaves you vulnerable during any and all actions.
Speaking of attacking, while there are a range of weapons and spells to use there never really feels to be a difference between anything, and the small fact that you have to repeatedly press a button to continue attacking can often be a nuisance – though not as much as the recharge in between attacks. Every attack has to be recharged before the button will work again, and while this does stop you just spamming attacks and makes sense for spells and special moves, having to wait for the game to register that you are allowed to attack again can break up the flow of combat enough to be noticeable.
Thankfully, the choice in characters is a little more noticeable. Genre stalwarts the warrior, the rogue and the mage are represented here, and are exactly as you imagined them when you read their title. The warrior runs around with heavy weapons hitting things into submission, the rogue likes to keep her range, whereas the mage can happily work in either but is less effective at both. It’s all very standard, but does allow for three somewhat different campaigns.
In the end what this all adds up to is a playable 20 or so hours of gameplay, but it’s gameplay that’s been done better elsewhere before, and once you start to notice all the little missing pieces it starts to unravel, and seeing out those 20 hours may become less of a viable option.
Design wise the game continues the theme of being utterly average. While graphically the game can look nice, and there’s no sign of slowdown when a horde of creatures all start charging your player character, it doesn’t do anything to really stand out, and with the camera positioned in such a place as to allow you to see what’s going on you can never really be close enough to inspect any finer detail in the game. The lack of an ability to zoom the camera is absent, and while that doesn’t present too much of a problem (it is after all far enough out to let you see the action but close enough to see the specifics) it again detracts from the overall experience.
Outside of the graphics the style itself is oh so very generic. All the creatures look exactly as you’d expect, the spells and weapons look like spells and weapons we’ve seen hundreds of times before, and to be honest it’s a game we’ve seen many times before. The sound follows suit with the general ambience, the soundtrack and the effects all evoking memories of the likes of Dungeon Siege.
One upside of everything is that you can drag a friend into the woefully average experience, should you wish to be bored together, though chances are one of you will quit before long thanks to the annoying omissions in control and horrendous checkpoint system. In a game where dodging isn’t an option at all, having an extremely limited pool of lives (used to be allowed to respawn at the latest checkpoint) is almost cruel. Once you run out of these respawns you have to restart the entire chapter again, which can be far too much of a grind for most players.
To be honest, the game can be fun to play at times; it will sometimes just all click into place and youll enjoy a casual drop-in and hack and slash title, but these occasions are few and far between, with the majority of the playtime being marred by the obvious omission, terrible checkpoint system and painfully standard overall feeling. If you really want another dungeoun crawling action RPG then you can do a lot worse than what’s on offer here, but you can definitely do a lot better as well. I’m hard pressed to recommend picking it up or avoiding it, its that criminally perfectly standard middle ground that few games ever manage to achieve, not good, not bad, just shockingly average, and that has to count for something right?