Evil Islands: Curse of The Lost Soul Preview

The really 'frightening' thing about this game is the substantial quantity of different weapons, spells, and armors. Your character will find many useful items on his journey through the Allods. Clearly, each Island will have a different city where your hero can purchase and trade items, runes, weapons and such.

Weapons will be made out of precious metals. The quality and strength of your weapons will depend largely on what kind of material you've managed to obtain. Again, I have to underline the great dedication the developers have put into designing artifacts and weaponry. For example, there's the camouflage feature - you can kill a wolf, skin it, and use its fur coat to disguise your character, allowing him to avoid attacks from other wolves. You can even take the fur and utilize it for the creation of armor.

The Item Constructing system will be simple in design and usage. Players have the possibility to dismantle their weapons, and that way gain the necessary components for constructing a totally different weapon. Components that come from dismantled weaponry are usually useful items and materials: like silver, bronze, blueprints for bows, and so on. The intriguing part comes when you realize that you can integrate magical features into your weapons. Different runes will need to be included in this process, and it is extremely important to know which one you use so that you can precisely arrange the weapon to your preferences. On the other hand, the players will have a useful Spell Constructor that functions in a slightly different manner. The runes play another important role within this construction system. Enemy units can be damaged with spells from a distance, but if your character is in the vicinity of the target, the spell may inflict damage upon him. Luckily, there's the feature of the "enemy filter" which will furnish your character with immunity to the spell. Of course, there will be a lot of diverse spells, but the most significant aspect is that the player can influence almost every possible incantation and set it to his own liking.

Graphics in Evil Islands are supposed to represent another major advance in comparison to Rage of Mages (just take a look at our 1600x1200 shots). You'll find that the game visually resembles the Myth series. The game will not only include snow, rain, and fog, it will also have storms and very detailed day/night changes. This means that the transition between day and night won't occur through a few simple shadowy alterations on the landscape. On the contrary, the days will cycle through a vast colored spectrum giving you a kind of yellowish streak in the morning, a mold of purple and orange in the afternoon, and finally a few shades of light bluish colors throughout the night (colored lighting is the next best thing to reusable rubbers, er, yeah - Ed). Each Island has its own graphic style and color patterns. For example the water areas are differently tinted so that they give out a more unique texture to the whole environment layout. Furthermore, monsters, NPCs, and all of the in-game unit models will have a certain breadth, both in texture detailing and animation features.

Your characters' clothes and armors will become red if they walk through a blood pool. What's more, the armor changes visually according to the damage your character receives during battle. And if that's not enough for ya, these visual changes will be displayed on the battle screen as well as the info/stat section. The features go even further with 'silly' little things like when you advance your character physically you're going to observe his shoulders widening - this is an interesting idea that will prove most useful in the multi-player, where players can modify the physical appearances of their characters (if they've gained the experience that is). As you can see the lush animation system of Evil Islands will simply have infinite possibilities.

So, Evil Islands comes as a mixture of complex item handling of Rage of Mages and the basic 3D appearance of the Myth series. The game won't have any class-systems, but, as I stated before, there will be the option of improving skills and abilities of your character by distributing experience points.

The multi-player offers a variety of features in the 6-player LAN or Internet mode. The six players can take on a cooperative multi-player game and perform quests in the single-player game areas (although monsters and items will differ from the single-player mode). The music score will have a diversity of themes and exotic tunes that will blend with the exciting in-game atmosphere. These different tunes will have a sound of Celtic, Medieval-European, and Indian folk music styles. Every tune goes with a certain area and it changes in respect to the action on screen.