Enclave

Unlike a lot of the reviews here, I came to this game totally fresh having never played it, let alone heard of it. As of tonight I have finished both the light and the dark side campaigns, having played though them both on medium. The game has a lot good things in it. It has a great atmosphere that oozes style and personality along with a lot of good ideas trying to shine through; the multiple character options and armor is actually worn and not just a general damage reduction. The result of the latter is that armor has spots it doesn’t protect, and you can aim for them. It’s quite satisfying to take down the knight who’s charging you while decked in full armor because you shot him in the eye. However, this is all marred by one gigantic flaw: the combat. The combat in Enclave is rough at best and infuriatingly broken at worst. For a hack and slash game, a game in which the core mechanic is combat, this is an unforgivable sin. It would be like designing a sports car with a two cylinder engine. The problems are largely due to two issues; flakiness in registering a hit and AI behavior. I’ve had numerous occasions where my attacks simply pass right through the enemy or some missile fly through a solid piece of scenery. This is doubly egregious when I’m using a ranged weapon because the targeting rectile will tell you when you are on ‘target’. Seeing one of your very limited high-end arrows fly right through an enemy head as if it had all the substance of a modern celebrity inflames all the wrong kinds of passions. The enemy’s diet must consist of coffee and jumping beans because they are terribly prone to twitch juking and jumping around as if the world was a trampoline, even while wearing full plate armor. Now this isn’t too bad in melee and not too awful in ranged combat when you have weapons that traverse the distance effectively instantly. However, I had none of those things for I was playing the ranged class and relying on arrows. When the enemy is in full kangaroo on a sugar high mode I can easily spend four arrows for every hit at medium range. Now before you think I’m just someone who can’t hit the broad side of a barn, I would point out that such jumping behavior is either looked down on or forcibly restricted in almost every single multiplayer FPS precisely for how it makes the jumper nigh unhittable. There is a third lesser issue with the combat and that is some of the hostiles seem unbalanced. For example, in the light campaign there are enemy sorcerers whose primary attack is a bolt attack which will sap half your health in one hit. Oh, did I mention that these bolts are homing and that a single sorcerer can have several of them in the air at once? I have two final nagging issues. Firstly, the game still uses checkpoints. This wouldn’t be surprising in a console game, but this is still in the computer release. The usage of checkpoints seems to serve the sole purpose of providing a mechanic for the player to lose coins on death (which will happen at any difficulty above easy). Nothing else happens you die. All the enemies stay dead, everything stays collected, and switches stay pulled. You only have to lose some coins and walk back to where you were and I can’t imagine the checkpoints are there to make you walk for a couple minutes. So the continued existence of checkpoints feels wrong. If you die before reaching a checkpoint? You have to restart the mission. This last bit is a sore spot for me because some of the levels don’t have a checkpoint, or the checkpoint is after a boss or some hairy fight (when it should be before), which means if you die you have to replay the whole mission. Secondly, the in-game cutscenes can’t be skipped, which is a bit of a nuisance if you have to replay an area a few times. The game does have a very unforgiving difficulty curve and with the reliance on precise aiming I can see how this would be a nightmare to play on a console. While there are a lot of good ideas in the game, the ideas are rough around the edges and don’t fit snugly with each other. I keep being tempted to bump it up to a three, much like you might feel inclined to say that your abusive ex wasn’t *that* bad, but then I keep remembering about the flawed combat. For all the game has going for it, I still can’t forgive that.

Enclave certainly is no masterpiece but a decent Hack&Slash game with a good atmosphere and quite good looking graphics despite it's age. The game is split up into two campaigns, light and dark. They share most of the levels, but always have different objectives. In each campaign you start as a certain character (Fighter in light, Rogue in dark) and meet more companions during the campaign. As soon as you have unlocked them, you are able to choose the character that fits your playstyle the most. The game has small RPG-emelents. During each mission you can find a certain amount of valuables and you are also rewarded for completing missions. When you choose the character for your next assignment you are able to spend the gold on equipment. The gold you accumulated acts as a barrier, e.g. if you collected 750 Gold so far you can give your character equipment worth 750 gold. You don't really spend the money. The equipment system isn't extremely deep but you regularly have to choose between using the best armor and the best weapon or if you will carry a long range weapon with you or not. Combat itself mostly comes down to dodging or blocking enemy blows while hitting them in return. Enemies can move quite erratic sometimes, so hitting them is not that easy. Another thing worth noting is, that the game supports most modern widescreen resolutions out of the box, so you don't have to search around in configuration files or use external tools to get it to work. With two campaigns and the various playable characters the game offers quite a bit of replayability, so you will get your moneys worth. If you like 3rd person action games I wholeheartedly recommend buying Enclave.

Nostalgia sometimes makes people judge games a lot more softly, I do it myself, but If you really want to know the good and the flaws of this game keep reading. Enclave it's a third person action adventure game, it has a lot of slashing, a good bit of range weapons shooting and even magical and steampunk bits. The thing that impress is the huge variety in playable characters, almost each one with unique powers and weapons. You can also play the storyline from the viewpoint of the two different factions in the game. The game sports very good textures and inspired designs for both characters and environment, it still looks quite good despite it's age. That said, the environment themselves are very little interactable, all the crates and barrels around the maps are static immovable objects, and even if some window will break if hitted not every window will do the same, ruining a bit player's immersion. Some of the level design are very good looking, There's a level for the assassin that has a skeleton bridge over a lava lake that's still quite impressive to see, sadly the game has luisy collision detection, both for the level itself and during fights. The gameplay is 99% ranged and melee fighting, with little exploration and a bit of backtracking, the problem here is that fighting is not as fun as in older titles like Severance or Die By The Sword. Very often you'll see your sword or your arrows go through enemies without hitting them, while sometimes they will be able to get through your shield, it's a bit annoying expecially in later levels of the game, where you have a lot of enemies to deal with. Another flaw that makes clear the game born on consoles is the horrible savegame feature, it uses checkpoints but those are often very distant one from the other so harm yourself with patience as you'll need to replay some level sections quite a bit, expecially if you choose hard mode. AI isn't really smart too, you'll often see enemies killing themselves in some stupid way. That said, the game is still worth the price only to see those lovely levels, the storyline itself is a bit bland but the fact that you can play with a lot of characters makes it interesting, especially if you love this kind of games

I'll break it down into a few areas of note, first the plot. The backstory is nice, it has that sensational feel of a "world gone crazy", altho there is the problem of how you as the player fit into it, it feels as tho you're just being led thru the missions, rather then actually making a difference. Now for the gameplay. The controls are simple, almost too simple, as there's not a whole lot of depth of combat, just hack and dodge really. Ranged attacks are nice, and require a good bit of skill to work well. Enemy AI hardly exists, as they perform some very strange acts, falling off high heights, forever running away despite being melee fighters, and setting a difficulty level doesn't help much, as certain enemies just seem to be way to hard for their own good. Lastly, the gameworld as a whole. As stated before, I feel like I'm being led thru the game, that being said the actual areas I fight in are well thought out. So well done, that I wanted a map at certain times cause I kept getting turned around by all the pretty stuff I saw. You really have to search every nook and cranny to find all the hidden items, and trust me, finding that last bag of gold (in game currency for upgraded weapons and armor) is soooo sweet. If you like medieval-style Hack and Slashes, Enclave is a good choice for 6 bucks (and a walk down memory lane never hurts either)