MRG
Newbie
- Joined
- Mar 24, 2007
- Messages
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Greetings all,
It's while being stuck playing games like Mage Knight Apocalypse that I really start to long for the day that i'll have a PC powerful enough to play a real RPG. An RPG like say Oblivion or the upcoming NWN2. It's not really such a mystery to me anymore why I have started to enjoy RTS based games.
Take the above mentioned "Mage Knight Apocalypse". This is one of those games that have a huge amount of potential, but sadly falls far short of what it could have been. Horrible camera positioning & lackluster combat, really kills a game. No matter if the graphics are pretty or the audio is decent.
To begin with, the game took a very long time to start up after I clicked on the games icon. Once I actually got in-game, the into was decent. The main menu is straight forward with the choices available. So a typical start if you will. After I clicked on the "Single Player" tab, a listing of the available chars comes up where you get to choose your race & player class. Being as there are 5 set classes, you are stuck picking from one of the 5 listed.
The 5 classes are:
1) Dwarf - Melee + Guns
2) Vampire - Necromancer
3) Elf - Paladin
4) Draconian - Mage
5) Amazon - Melee + Archer
The first I chose was the Dwarf. He looked promising. A Melee fighter that used guns. After changing a few very basic features of your player, like the looks of your hair, the color of your hair, your face looks & your skin & eye color, you quickly come to find out that you cannot rename your player. You are stuck with the name the game gives your player. This was a shallow, but big turnoff for me. I found a way around this by exporting your character to MP and changing his or her name there. However, I continue and soon entered the game.
The first thing you see is that the graphics are rather nice. Crisp & vibrant. The second thing you see is that the interface is similar to that of games like Diablo 2 & Titans Quest. At the bottom of your screen you have an area where you can place quick use items like potions & weapon attacks. Quick & easy you would think, but instead you spend several minutes trying to figure out how to customize the bottom part of the screen.
Then you spend more time trying to enlarge the inventory screen & the character screen when you finally realize that you can't. They are way too small & cramped. The same goes for the Skill Tree as well. I found myself having to squint at the screen to see if I had a rifle equiped or a staff since only a small portion of the weapons icon is displayed. You have to place the curser over each of the slots to see what they hold or what they do.
Not off to a great start but I can live with it. 10 seconds later you come across an NPC that gives you your first mission. (I have the tutorial enabled so i'm not sure what it looks like if you disable it) Simple enough except for the fact that along with the spoken dialogue, there are subtitles. This is a great feature for the hearing impaired, but for those that arn't, it's pointless. So more time spent wasted looking for a way to turn them off when I find there is no option to.
As my bowlegged little guy runs with a speed that would put an olympic sprinter to shame, I come across my first enemy. I have to admit the model is pretty nice. An orc by the looks of him. So I swing my axe and press the mouse button again to swing again.. nothing happens... 5 seconds later my player swings again. Was that a glitch? Nope, it would appear that there is a delay between swings. The less-than-great combat rears it's ugly head for the first time. So we stand there taking turns hitting each other when I finally kill him. God's fist from above must have struck him, because as I killed him with the last swing, he fell really hard to the ground really fast. Ok.. Guess he was a little fatter than I thought. His corpse glows red before he fades away. If you don't pay close attention after every enemy you kill, you are going to miss A LOT of loot. The bags were hard to spot on the ground. They had this little sparkle to mark their position, but thats it. Open and close the bad without taking all the loot & the sparkle stops. So now you gotta find the loot bag again. I pressed the ALT key in the hopes that the loot would stand out like it did in Diablo 2 & other games. Nope.
So I continue running and notice the camera view to slowly start rotating around so that the camra is now in my face. Now I am unable to see if there are any enemies in front of me. I have to run around until the camera view gets to where I can see infront of me. I repeat, the camera does NOT follow the player like it does in 99% of every other game. I died several times because I could not see infront of me. Once I get the camera looking down from behind me, I zoomed in and was pleased to see how nice everything looked. As along as a game looks & runs nice, iit makes it easier to overlook other short commings, provided those short-commings are not too pronounced.
As you progress you unlock skills just like you did in Diablo 2 & Titans Quest. From Skill trees. I was not impressed at all with my dwarfs starting melee skill. It's the Bash skill, but instead of bashing an enemy, I have this onetime red aura flash around me and the skill works for one hit. No special animation, simply a red flash and a regular hit. If I learn bash, I darn well want to bash stuff. To SEE me bash stuff. I thought that maybe the skill was a buff on a timer, that once used would have a duration of say 10 or 15 seconds. I never noticed any change in the damage that my character did.
The ranged skill was decent, though it's considered a special attack and so it's use is limited before you "Overheat" and so have to cool down before you can use the ranged attack again. It is cool once you start shooting, though the shots were too far apart, just like attacking with a melee attack was. Attack speed was very slow, a condition that did not seem to effect the enemies.
This all happened within the first 15 mins of playing. For me this does not bode well as to how the rest of the game will be.
I played with one of the other 5 chars a bit, the Amazon. From what I can see, she looks like she is the games tank. Decent attacks with cool skill animations. However, the same poor camera views and the same long intervals between swings, takes alot of the fun away.
Lets take turns hitting each other. First you, then me, then you, then me...
If a game does not capture my attention right at the start, it's really hard to force myself to play it further. With this game, I REALLY hope it gets better, because this game is fun & it does look nice, there are just a few glaring issues that quickly takes away the fun from this game. I just downloaded the 40mb patch. We'll see if it helps. The fixes in the patches readme do look as if they fix a whole lot of problems people were having.
The game also has MP. However, due to time constraints (and my overall impression of the SP game) I did not get a chance to put the MP part of the game through the tests I would normally do. If anyone here gets a chance to play the MP, please post your impressions of it here. Also by the time you read this, a patch has been released which addresses several bugs, one of which is the camera issue.
Official website:
http://mageknight.namco.com/main.html
Final Score 2.5/5
-MRG
It's while being stuck playing games like Mage Knight Apocalypse that I really start to long for the day that i'll have a PC powerful enough to play a real RPG. An RPG like say Oblivion or the upcoming NWN2. It's not really such a mystery to me anymore why I have started to enjoy RTS based games.
Take the above mentioned "Mage Knight Apocalypse". This is one of those games that have a huge amount of potential, but sadly falls far short of what it could have been. Horrible camera positioning & lackluster combat, really kills a game. No matter if the graphics are pretty or the audio is decent.
To begin with, the game took a very long time to start up after I clicked on the games icon. Once I actually got in-game, the into was decent. The main menu is straight forward with the choices available. So a typical start if you will. After I clicked on the "Single Player" tab, a listing of the available chars comes up where you get to choose your race & player class. Being as there are 5 set classes, you are stuck picking from one of the 5 listed.
The 5 classes are:
1) Dwarf - Melee + Guns
2) Vampire - Necromancer
3) Elf - Paladin
4) Draconian - Mage
5) Amazon - Melee + Archer
The first I chose was the Dwarf. He looked promising. A Melee fighter that used guns. After changing a few very basic features of your player, like the looks of your hair, the color of your hair, your face looks & your skin & eye color, you quickly come to find out that you cannot rename your player. You are stuck with the name the game gives your player. This was a shallow, but big turnoff for me. I found a way around this by exporting your character to MP and changing his or her name there. However, I continue and soon entered the game.
The first thing you see is that the graphics are rather nice. Crisp & vibrant. The second thing you see is that the interface is similar to that of games like Diablo 2 & Titans Quest. At the bottom of your screen you have an area where you can place quick use items like potions & weapon attacks. Quick & easy you would think, but instead you spend several minutes trying to figure out how to customize the bottom part of the screen.
Then you spend more time trying to enlarge the inventory screen & the character screen when you finally realize that you can't. They are way too small & cramped. The same goes for the Skill Tree as well. I found myself having to squint at the screen to see if I had a rifle equiped or a staff since only a small portion of the weapons icon is displayed. You have to place the curser over each of the slots to see what they hold or what they do.
Not off to a great start but I can live with it. 10 seconds later you come across an NPC that gives you your first mission. (I have the tutorial enabled so i'm not sure what it looks like if you disable it) Simple enough except for the fact that along with the spoken dialogue, there are subtitles. This is a great feature for the hearing impaired, but for those that arn't, it's pointless. So more time spent wasted looking for a way to turn them off when I find there is no option to.
As my bowlegged little guy runs with a speed that would put an olympic sprinter to shame, I come across my first enemy. I have to admit the model is pretty nice. An orc by the looks of him. So I swing my axe and press the mouse button again to swing again.. nothing happens... 5 seconds later my player swings again. Was that a glitch? Nope, it would appear that there is a delay between swings. The less-than-great combat rears it's ugly head for the first time. So we stand there taking turns hitting each other when I finally kill him. God's fist from above must have struck him, because as I killed him with the last swing, he fell really hard to the ground really fast. Ok.. Guess he was a little fatter than I thought. His corpse glows red before he fades away. If you don't pay close attention after every enemy you kill, you are going to miss A LOT of loot. The bags were hard to spot on the ground. They had this little sparkle to mark their position, but thats it. Open and close the bad without taking all the loot & the sparkle stops. So now you gotta find the loot bag again. I pressed the ALT key in the hopes that the loot would stand out like it did in Diablo 2 & other games. Nope.
So I continue running and notice the camera view to slowly start rotating around so that the camra is now in my face. Now I am unable to see if there are any enemies in front of me. I have to run around until the camera view gets to where I can see infront of me. I repeat, the camera does NOT follow the player like it does in 99% of every other game. I died several times because I could not see infront of me. Once I get the camera looking down from behind me, I zoomed in and was pleased to see how nice everything looked. As along as a game looks & runs nice, iit makes it easier to overlook other short commings, provided those short-commings are not too pronounced.
As you progress you unlock skills just like you did in Diablo 2 & Titans Quest. From Skill trees. I was not impressed at all with my dwarfs starting melee skill. It's the Bash skill, but instead of bashing an enemy, I have this onetime red aura flash around me and the skill works for one hit. No special animation, simply a red flash and a regular hit. If I learn bash, I darn well want to bash stuff. To SEE me bash stuff. I thought that maybe the skill was a buff on a timer, that once used would have a duration of say 10 or 15 seconds. I never noticed any change in the damage that my character did.
The ranged skill was decent, though it's considered a special attack and so it's use is limited before you "Overheat" and so have to cool down before you can use the ranged attack again. It is cool once you start shooting, though the shots were too far apart, just like attacking with a melee attack was. Attack speed was very slow, a condition that did not seem to effect the enemies.
This all happened within the first 15 mins of playing. For me this does not bode well as to how the rest of the game will be.
I played with one of the other 5 chars a bit, the Amazon. From what I can see, she looks like she is the games tank. Decent attacks with cool skill animations. However, the same poor camera views and the same long intervals between swings, takes alot of the fun away.
Lets take turns hitting each other. First you, then me, then you, then me...
If a game does not capture my attention right at the start, it's really hard to force myself to play it further. With this game, I REALLY hope it gets better, because this game is fun & it does look nice, there are just a few glaring issues that quickly takes away the fun from this game. I just downloaded the 40mb patch. We'll see if it helps. The fixes in the patches readme do look as if they fix a whole lot of problems people were having.
The game also has MP. However, due to time constraints (and my overall impression of the SP game) I did not get a chance to put the MP part of the game through the tests I would normally do. If anyone here gets a chance to play the MP, please post your impressions of it here. Also by the time you read this, a patch has been released which addresses several bugs, one of which is the camera issue.
Official website:
http://mageknight.namco.com/main.html
Final Score 2.5/5
-MRG
