Silverfall Preview

There's a new Action-RPG coming to town. I think I can anticipate your response: Another Action-RPG, you say? Do we really need another one? Well, we do if it's a good one. Ever since Blizzard practically created the genre with Diablo and Diablo II, many developers have attempted to steal some of their limelight, though most failed in the attempts to capture the "crown" Other developers have failed so miserably that you can help but one wonder how somebody would dare put their name on it.

Even the smallest person can fight off a big lump of iron!

Never go fishing without a sword.

Here we have Silverfall. Created and published by Monte Cristo and Atari, does this game have what it takes to capture your attention and keep you at nights? Although, what I played was a preview and the game is not yet finished, it appears to be shaping up very nicely.

To start off, let me give you a little background. You start the game by choosing your race from elves, human, trolls and goblins. In addition you can choose male/female and customize your looks to some degree but it is very basic to the point of making it barely worth mentioning. There are enough combinations of hair and other options to give you a fairly unique look. After that, give yourself a name and you're off.

Once the game starts, you begin a tutorial of sorts that serves as introduction to the storyline. Have you heard this one before? An enemy destroys your home/family/town or steals your girlfriend/princess/sister and your job is kill/destroy/obliterate them? In this story, your home town is being attacked by an army of undead and you end up fleeing into the wilderness at the end of the level. The game has to have a story right? Might as well use something that tried and tested.

In all fairness, I didn't get too far into the story, and when it comes to Action-RPG's, I never cared much for the story anyways. What matters is the game itself. Once I was past the illustrious story-line I got into the meat of the game-play, and I must say I was fairly impressed by what I saw there.

We will start off with the skill system. Like many games of this type, you do not choose a class at the beginning of the game. Instead you customize your character through series of skill trees. As you assign skill points, you develop into the class you would like to be. Want to be an archer? Then put points in the arrow skills, etc. There are number of different trees to choose from and you can jump around as you see fit.

Some of the skills will go directly into combat while others can be assigned to give you a variety of different abilities. One gave me a bonus to magic drop rates while another increased my movement speed. I ended up creating a fighter primarily with a few skill points thrown into quick recovery skills to reduce my downtime between fights. All the skill trees look to be very nicely done and as a added bonus, you can always go back and un-assign skill points at certain vendors (for a fee), if you feel like you made a mistake.

Running around the game itself, I was impressed by the how open-ended it was. Right from the get-go, I had the choice of doing the primary quest to move the story along or I could choose from about 10 secondary quests. The secondary quest had a nice variety, some of which where the means to unlock different aspects of the game. One for example, required me to track down a goblin's missing safe. Once I returned it to him, I was then able to store extra equipment there. It also unlocked the ability to buy insurance, so when I died, my gear stayed with me rather then being left at the "grave site"

If you set a quest as active in your journal, you will get an arrow on you mini map telling you were to go. This might make to too easy for some, but when the game is this open ended, I loved knowing exactly where to go to complete the current quest. It kept the game moving along and helped avoid frustration from pointless wondering.

While I was completing various quests and killing mobs along the way, I was pleasantly surprised by the level of detail in the game. There is a lot of detail. Everything looks different and original. It also looks like they took the time to design each area, not just take the same graphics set and repeat it over and over and over. The graphics themselves are form of 3D cell-shading that looks a bit cartoony but comes across well. The downside of all this detail was the frame-rate, more on that later.

The animations of the characters looked nice also. When I attacked monsters with my fighter, he would attack with a number of different backhand, overhand, and forward swings of his axe. Although the swings themselves probably didn't affect the damage in anyway, it was more pleasing to the eye then a simple forward slash, forward slash, forward slash.