Evil Islands: Curse of The Lost Soul Review

Finally, there is the option to lead up to three characters in the battle, adding even more tactics and certainly some strategy elements to the gameplay. Carefully choose members of your party, and make sure you balance out their skills well, so that they can be as effective as possible against stronger opponents (you'll need it when the time comes). The enemy AI is very good (so is the pathfinding), and it depends largely on the type of enemy you're facing. If you're fighting a tiger it will usually attack the target closest to him, but if you're fighting a human it will try to attack the weakest member of your party. Units using bows and other long-range weapons (like spells) will try to stay as far away from your melee party members as possible. All this points out to the fact that you'll have to position your party members effectively and reposition them accordingly if you want to win. A nice strategy addition to an already complex and feature-rich gameplay.

There's no doubt in my mind that Nival Interactive knows what they're doing when it comes to making an addictive game. Hell, I told you I got that nasty migraine and all. Evil Islands features a plethora of gameplay options, which account for 95% of the game's addictiveness (just this one more mission before I go to bed, because I long for that steel long sword). There is one catch though. Getting into the whole game is not that hard -- takes some practice, but you'll eventually become efficient at it, but as you progress deeper into it, you'll suddenly find yourself in a situation where your opponents will be much stronger than yourself. It could probably be because I didn't allocate my experience points right, or something, but it still hardly justifies playing for days only to reach a point were it looks like you're facing a "dead end of stronger opponents". The game will become devilishly hard as you progress further, almost to the point where you'll want to resort to cheating out of sheer frustration and desire to kick that mofo's ass for beating you up for the tenth time in a row.

In many ways, the gameplay balance is spot on (in terms of genre mixture, and mission design), but it does get irritatingly unbalanced (i.e. the game is hard as hell) when you get to higher levels, especially because of the fact that there are some missions, which can't be finished by employing stealth and sneaking (foreman's bodyguard anybody).

Further more, Russian developers obviously face a whole lot of financial difficulties during the development phase, especially when they try to port games to English. The dialogue in Evil Islands sounds weird (odd) at times (whoever wrote that stuff), and the voice acting is just ridiculous. The atmospheric music compensates some of the lacking sound effects, but that is not nearly enough to improve the general impression which is plagued by low budget voice overs. The cut scenes also play an important role in adding to the overall atmosphere (Diablo style) in games like Evil Islands, but they are unfortunately too scarce here and don't help to make the plot more intriguing.

The Eye-candy And Wrapping Things Up.

The environments in Evil Islands look exceptionally well -- with a lot of detail, lush vegetation, and great weather effects. The lighting is excellent; model shadows look highly realistic and they add a lot of ambient. The camera movement is smooth and natural, and it does not in any way interfere with the gameplay. The only problem I had with the visuals from a strictly aesthetic point of view is the appearance of the somewhat goofy looking characters. Still, this isn't that much of a drawback, since most of the time you'll be playing from a semi-isometric / birds eye perspective in order to be able to plan your actions better. The biggest drawback when it comes to graphics are the insanely high system requirements. Undoubtedly, there is a lot of polys per scene in Evil Islands, but that still can't justify choppiness on a 1GHz T-bird / 256Mb RAM / GeForce GTS 2 system. I also tried playing the game on a lower-end Pentium III 600MHz / GeForce setup, but it was just painfully slow. Looks like Nival should've spent more time optimizing the code, but there obviously wasn't enough time, nor resources for them to do so.

Even with all the drawbacks that are mostly due to weak funding and pushy publishers Evil Islands turned out to be one heck of a game, featuring a highly addictive mix of already addictive enough styles of gameplay. Chris Taylor's Dungeon Siege looks like it's in many ways similar to Evil Islands, so it will be interesting to see how Nival's valiant effort stacks up against the big boys.