The Quest

I'm an old-school fan of grid-based RPGs and played everything back from Dungeon Master when it came out. This showed promise based on the reviews, but after a few hours put in, it's really not living up to its reputation and it's really disappointing. First, the overall feel is very amateurish, in the way the keyboard and mouse sometimes open containers, sometimes not... Combat is incredibly basic and boring relative to the huge complexity of stats and crafting systems which feel a bit useless. Writing is really terrible too, and what really shuts it down for me is the depiction of women, which is immature, stereotypical and misogynistic. One of the early quests is to save a farmer from a band of Amazons. First their graphic is cheaply sexual, when you enter their cave there's a sign that says "Female Empire", the Queen offers you a night of lust and sex to distract you from your quest, to which you answer something along the lines of "Are you insane? Shut up." before killing them all. What more to say.

In the first town, there are a number of people, but they are represented by only a few characters. Here's my experience. Hey there a random dude. Talk to him. He's a begger (person 1). In the chat dialog, he has a different graphic for a face than the dude walking around in the world. ok whatever... Walk a little further. Hey there's the same random dude. Talk to him and he's someone else (person 2) with a new face in the chat dialog. Walk a little further. There's the same random dude again. Talk to him. He's someone new (person 3) with another new face in the chat dialog. Walk a little further. There's the same random dude again. Talk to him. He's someone new (person 4). After doing this about 10 times, I just said "this game sucks" and turned it off. You can't keep track of the people walking around when they're all the same person visually. There are only about 5 townspeople representing dozens of chat characters. Fought an archer in the woods. Killed her. She completely disappears upon death. No dead body or anything. I'm out and uninstalling this game.