Stranger Review
-
Category: News ArchiveHits: 829
Much of the setting is just as disorienting. The landscape mixes alien and surreal, using Day-Glo colors, luminescent lighting, and flora and fauna that seem to have been dropped in from a old Star Trek episode. Much of the soundtrack consists of quirky, synthy tunes that reinforce the mushroom-enhanced vibe of the whole game. Missions in the single-player campaign are really just separate maps with objectives that have nothing to do with each other. Most goals involve a lot of tedious lever pushing, along with battles against boss monsters that require some specific trick to defeat. Monsters themselves are--you guessed it--pretty darn weird. You take on a host of way-out enemies including what appear to be prehistoric butterflies, loads of creepy bugs, orcs who seem to have had their ears flattened out with an iron, and others that defy description. The menagerie here is so off the wall that you almost long for the demons and undead that take up space in every other action RPG.
Although the basic idea is a straightforward mix of a Diablo-style clickfest RPG with RTS staples such as gathering resources and hiring mercenaries (who serve as party members in place of old-fashioned recruited NPCs), the interface is a mess. Instead of the paper-doll interface that RPGs have been leaning on for inventory management for more than a decade, the game uses a lot of dragging and dropping. For instance, to equip a sword, you have to pull up the inventory and then drag the sword either to the appropriate slot on the separate character sheet or to the character himself on the main game screen. All in all, this works, but feels clunky and is hardly intuitive.
