Birth of Shadows Review
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The music and sound effects are a notch above that, and really are pretty good. The music is a bit intrusive and overly orchestral, but sets the atmosphere well and is generally well done. The sound effects are pretty standard, but there's not an annoying one amongst them. They're slightly repetitive but just to the point where you can learn to recognize spells or attacks made against you by sound, which is only a plus. Combat
The focus of the game is combat. Opponents are pre-placed on the static map so you'll always meet the same adversaries at the same spot. Once they're dead, they'll respawn after awhile, so if you run to a fortress to kill its inhabitants you might even have to kill the same opponents going back as you did going in.
Simply put, combat pacing is of the Infinity Engine school. There's a 2-second timer on actions, but it runs in real-time over that. The similarity ends there, though, making the rest of the game's combat system fairly unique: you select an enemy by clicking on him, then in those 2-second intervals of action you select the spell you want your character to use on the enemy next.
As I mentioned earlier, there are 16 spells in total and, as you progress, it becomes increasingly more important to combine them properly. In particular, there is one element of combat called (rage). As you attack NPCs or cast non-damaging spells on them, they will gain in rage until they become enraged for about 5 seconds. With the proper spell, you can tap into that rage to give it to your character, which he in turn can use to support spells like life-draining or a special harm spell that does more damage depending on how much rage you've acquired. This is not to be confused with mana as the game has none of that but rather has a vitally important supporting role.
If you don't balance spells like summoning a pet, fear (which petrifies the opponent), attack and life-leech properly, you'll soon end up dead (though dying has no direct consequence except sending your character back to the start of the level). As you progressively face more and tougher opponents, choosing exactly the right action on exactly the right adversary becomes vitally important. To ensure that you can make the right choices, the game sports a pause function. While paused, you can check how long your opponents will remain frozen if you used fear on them, check who is closest to being enraged, etc. and calmly plan your next step.
However, because all character builds are identical, this is slightly less (tactical) than you'd imagine. Based on my experience, the game's creator had a certain tactic in mind and if you want to win battles you're going to have to follow it closely. There is some elbow room, but you'll most likely fall into a similar routine during specific areas of the game. For example, early on you'll always want to freeze a couple of enemies, summon a pet on the third, and then draw rage to kill them as quickly as you can. From then on, you can simply rinse and repeat - the same tactics work for every fight with only slight variations depending on what kind of immunities the monsters on the other side have. Combat becomes steadily more complex, but doesn't really lose this repetitive feel until you're a ways in.
Particularly complex and challenging fights are the fortress fights. Fortresses are basically locations that spawn monsters, and as you approach they'll send out groups of creatures for you to fight in waves. You can't run away too far or the fortress will reset to its first wave, and the same happens if you die, which means you have to fight the fortress' waves in one go with no pausing in between. This makes fortress fights deliciously challenging.
An Incomplete Experience
Birth of Shadows takes some really novel approaches to several typical hack-and-slash ideas. Despite this, the game has an unfinished feel to it. Not because it is bugged or lacks polish the balance is pretty good and the interface is pretty intuitive but because some design decisions simply don't seem very well thought out.
A major gripe is that the game is too long. This seems like an odd complaint to make, but it's a natural consequence of the designer choosing to clearly go for quantity of quests and maps rather than quality. This means the main storyline and the sidequests end up playing as if it's an MMO only it isn't, and there's really no strong appeal to keep going once you're a ways in. The story isn't that interesting, the quests basically stay the same, and your character doesn't feel like your own since he's not customizable. This makes character progression a fairly uninteresting prospect. Tauter quest design with more variation would have helped here, but the character progression really is the biggest problem.
Precision Games tosses out hack-and-slash basics like loot-hoarding and branching, class-based skill trees and I applaud them for it, as there is absolutely nothing wrong with killing off some tired, overdone ideas. The problem here is that those ideas actually work in other games and if you're going to remove them, you're going to have to offer something to replace that part of the experience. Birth of Shadows doesn't do that, thus you end up feeling like your character isn't progressing enough an appeal that was made in Diablo and its clones mostly by character customization and statistic-laden loot that simply doesn't exist in Birth of Shadows.
