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Isometric dungeon crawl centred on the important elements: hacking, slashing, and addictively stealing time.

Darkstone is an isometric hack ‘n’ slash game that would be familiar to anyone who’s a fan of devilish dungeon crawls, but it is definitely a lot more than a simple knock off; it’s a click-hungry time killer that’s a great coffee-break game, and it’s available on GOG.com right now for $5.99.

Darkstone allows you to select a hero--or heroes, because you’re allowed to control a party of two--from well-known classes (Warrior-brute force, Monk-healing, Assassin-stealth, and Wizard-offensive spells, with female equivalents of each: Amazon, Priestess, Sorceress, and Thief) and use 32 different spells, 22 skills, 22 types of weapons, to explore 37 different levels. That is a lot of variety, but when you add that the game creates an entirely random map and adventure for each new game, complete with new missions, new items, and new dungeon placement in castles, dungeons, plague-ridden cities, and forests, you have to admit that it’s a lot of a lot of variety.

Darkstone sports a few features that makes it the most easy-to-play game released on GOG.com today: everything can be controlled thrpough a mouse-click; the game features a fully adjustable camera that's actually really easy to control (for your favorite peeking around dark dungeon corridors); all it takes to kill a monster is to click on it (and a blade and some armor and some exp, obviously). Fully-3D graphics, a well done sound track, great combat sounds and animations (that matters more than you’d think in a hack-and-slash!) only prove that Darkstone developers knew well how to make an excellent action-RPG.

Overall, Darkstone for $5.99 is a steal. Did we mention it has multiplayer? No? Darkstone features great multiplayer. And yes, you should try it with a friend in co-op!
Anyone know what version this one is patched to?
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KrankyKat: There's no stash, no. Just toss everything on the ground in the town close to the fences (the green grass patch) or current dungeon and pick it up when you leave. In town it'll remain forever (in singleplayer, MP was similar but a little different) and possibly forever in the dungeons as well. Just can't recall for sure on the latter.

There is no "highlight items" function in Darkstone.
thanks for the hints, cool!
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F1ach: Anyone know what version this one is patched to?
installer says 1.0.0.7
Post edited April 11, 2012 by Kunovski
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F1ach: Anyone know what version this one is patched to?
the readme file says 1.0.5B

Edited and removed my question about the hot key list. Found it in the manual.
Post edited April 11, 2012 by Zandolf
Played this quite a bit with a modem-to-modem pal back in the day. It was sort of my diablo clone of choice...I think I played it more than I did Diablo II at its height.

I had fun grinding and crawling with my friend over our puny 56K modems, though it was very disposable entertainment; not a "serious" RPG in any way. I don't think I could revisit it today--Darkstone very much suffers from the "beat-with-an-ugly-stick" look so endemic to late 90s/early 00s 3D games. All those blocky polygons and models that looked like poorly carved hunks of wood... (NWN did too, though it wasn't quite as gratuitous)

For that reason an isometric 2D dungeon-crawler like Nox has aged a lot better (and isometric 2D RPGs in general). It's a lot easier on the eyes, the same way a platformer like Oddworld is (which is even older than Darkstone) with detailed and beautifully rendered background art.

Still a Good Old Game though.
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F1ach: Anyone know what version this one is patched to?
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Zandolf: the readme file says 1.0.5B

Edited and removed my question about the hot key list. Found it in the manual.
Cheers, thats the highest one I have, I'll have a look for 7, maybe its a win 7 patch.
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silveri: I own the original CD for this game, and I absolutely loved it, and still want to replay it. TONS of replayability and fun in this one, and who didn't love the levelling up sound? "YES!!" :-)

About 6 months ago, I pulled out the CD, installed in on my XP Pro machine, and fired it up. The problem I ran into was that the modern nVidia graphics card I have now didn't quite work perfectly with what Darkstone wanted/expected. I could play the game, but there was a lot of clipping/seeing through walls/malformed roofs of buildings, points/corners of things that were stretched into odd spaces apart from the main objects, etc...

At the time, I disappointedly put the CD away again after seeing these graphic issues.

Does the GoG release fix these problems? If so, it's an instabuy, the hell with waiting for a sale.
No, the GoG release does not seem to fix these problems. It's currently unplayable on WinXP SP3, nVidia 9600 GT because of massive graphics errors that make the texts blink or disappear even during the setup menu. This might be unique to WinXP or unique to nVidia (probably the latter). I'm not going change my graphics card for that ;-).
Selecting compatibility mode (Win2000/Win98SE) even asks for the CDROM(!)
This looks like a flawed crack to me.
Check the community support for Darkstone for a thread that describes this.
I'm hoping for a (near?) future patch that will fix this. This should have been mentioned/ tested by GoG, because WinXP/ nVidia is still quite common for a retro game rig.
The game won't play on Wine either, so Linux/ Mac is not an option here... I might try it on my MacBook(Intel GMA integrated graphics) using Bootcamp.
Post edited April 23, 2012 by jorlin
Boobz on the front page! I knew it GOG is not going to abandon the old habits... :D
Mammaries or fare thee well!
I told a friend over skype that Darkstone was released here. He made a sound like he was suffocating. 20 minutes later we were playing Darkstone multiplayer.
:O :O Thank you! My girlfriend and I were just talking about how awesome this game was the other day, and were trying to find it.

System Shock 2 now? :P
Zandolf: "t looks good to me. Only a few hours into it and no problems so far. "

What's your video card?

jorlin: Thanks for all the extra info! I found the thread on the Darkstone forum, and every poster seems to have an nVidia card (myself included), so I'm betting that's the common factor here. I know it's nuts to spend $100+ on a different type of video card (ATI maybe?) to get a $5 game working, but I'm tempted...
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silveri: Zandolf: "t looks good to me. Only a few hours into it and no problems so far. "

What's your video card?

jorlin: Thanks for all the extra info! I found the thread on the Darkstone forum, and every poster seems to have an nVidia card (myself included), so I'm betting that's the common factor here. I know it's nuts to spend $100+ on a different type of video card (ATI maybe?) to get a $5 game working, but I'm tempted...
Have an ATI Radeon HD 6870 card. I use to buy Nvida cards but this computer build was with a AMD Phenom II. Thought it would be different to go with AMD for Video and the CPU. So far so good:) All I did to get Darkstone to work was change compatability to XP service pack 3. Hope this helps.
I have a Radeon card HD 5450, it's absolute shite, but it runs Darkstone (1.05b) fine.
Ha, I'm sure us ATI users would trade you compatibility with Dungeon Keeper 2 for this game any day...
Just got DARKSTONE. It freezes up and the screen turn bright yellow. The mouse pointer also hesitates. Have to cont alt del to get out of it. .Anyone else have this problem or know of an update to fix it?
I have an AMD ATHLON 64X2 DUAL CORE 4000. Also NVIDIA nFORCE PCI.
All other games work fine.
Here's a small list of links to various mods and patches that I've found and hopefully some will find useful:

First off, for those with trouble running/installing the hard copy to win 7 64 (Might be useful to gog users as well) this trouble shooter/solution might help.

A list of downloads and mods:

Patch 1.05
RPG Planet downloads
Small list of quests and utilities

Hope this helps enjoy!
Post edited April 16, 2012 by takezodunmer2005