Evil Islands: Curse of The Lost Soul Preview

Hold on to your crystal helmets and golden armors kids, the Russian development team, at Nival Interactive, is back with a new action-packed role-playing game with strategy elements. After their success with Rage of Mages, they have finally decided to take their game development to a higher plane. Their new project, Evil Islands, features the same old world and species of the Allods, only this time presented in a full 3D environment. The scenario is different though, and it focuses more on the individual story of your main character.

Evil Islands will take place on the same grounds as the Rage of Mages. After the Great Catastrophe, the land has split into three chief Islands that will be your battlegrounds. The leading character awakens unaware of his identity and the purpose of his existence; later, he obviously, discovers his name (Zak) and the reason he is involved in the whole mess on Allods. The rest of the scenario is best unrevealed, however the plot is definitely going to be non-linear, and you can expect many changes and twists in the storyline as your character immerses deeper into the unknown regions of the mysterious Islands. This character won't be an enormous Hack&Slashing barbarian that likes to chop down an odd horde of malevolent monsters now and then. To put it simply, he's a pretty normal person who doesn't have any particularly amazing magical or fighting powers in the beginning of the game. Although, when he gains a bit of experience, he will impress you with the various tactics he will be able to use against his enemies.

Initially, you'll find that this ordinary individual has a wide variety of predetermined characteristics. He will not relentlessly charge into battle, better yet he's gonna sneak, crawl, and backstab. Backstabbing is one of his most interesting abilities, which if upgraded, allows you to creep behind the enemy and take him out with a single move, without him actually noticing you. In time, Zak gathers experience points and distributes them into dexterity, strength, and intelligence that will further enhance his sub-skills like archery, elemental, sense, astral, stealing and so on.

Evil Islands features monster units like demons, orcs, and even dragons. Yes, you've read it correctly, dragons! The creators of Evil Islands have promised that the monsters would react according to their enhanced AI, which means they won't be easily beaten and you can be sure that there will be a lot of them. Just like in Rage 1&2, it will be extremely perilous to attack larger opponents like ogres; unless you've gathered enough experience, you'll be crushed like an undersized vermin.

Herein lies the innovatory combat-system, which will let you aim at particular parts of your enemies' bodies. For instance, you can seriously injure your adversary with an accurate knock on the head (that's assuming of course you have the luck of bull's-eying the desired spot), or you could strike on his arm which will reduce his defensive abilities, and finally if you wound his legs it will make it difficult for him to run away.

Your opponents will strike quickly when they see you, giving you very little time for thinking out an adequate counter-attack. However, the developers have included a pause option, like in Baldur's Gate - you can freeze the action-packed real-time combat, thus allowing yourself to plan out the battle moves and give out orders more efficiently. Also, you have the option of grouping your characters for overcoming a more dangerous enemy (like an Ogre for instance). These tactical (strategy) characteristics of Evil Islands should bring a more pleasing way of combat for a wide variety of gamers out there.

Nival's talent for RPG production promises a lot . The game has been in development for two and a half years now. The German and Russian versions of Evil Islands have been released last year and the US version is supposed to appear in stores in April.