I know, this game is in Alpha so why the stellar rating? Because I already had so much fun with it to more than justify the price. I got the game through Kickstarter so it only cost me 25 bucks. I played the first game about 60 hours. I played this game for about 24 hours. I love games with great story and with interesting combat systems. So let's see: Combat system If you played the original title you will feel right at home as it is very similar. If you did not: It is turn based, your characters have lot of skills which interacts with each other to cause great (and deadly) effects. You can conjure up rain and then spread lighting based stuns, you can conjure poison clouds and explode them via fireballs or even bleed your enemies and then heal from blood if you are so inclined. It is quick, fun and looks awesome! Character system You can be stealthy, you can be tanky, you can be a great so(u)rcerer, or you can mix it up a bit. There are not many constrictions, but you can create a inefective character if you spread her abilities too thin, so beware. If you are not familiar game it is best to stay in your class and specialize your atributtes. Races so far in game allow for some fun, game changing effects. Story This is the main strong point of the game. The world is lively, depending on your race and background (even some skills) lot of it changes, people react differently and you can do different things. want to play as elven outcast and eat body parts to feel memories of the dead, you can play as a Lizardman king who wants to make lizards great again. You can deal with people peacefully or you can cut through anyone with a different opinion. You can follow laws, break them or even bend them a little here and there. I played through the content three times and always found something different, new and exciting. I love this game, and even in its current state it allows for hours of fun and has great replayability. I would recommend it to anyone looking for great stories and strong characters with unique backgrounds. This is for me the definition of a well made RPG.
I am a big fan of survival games even though I am not very good at actuualy winning them - often there is just too much stuff to care about, that I simply forget and fail as a result. This game is a nice surprise, the survival part is very intuitive, it can be extremely fast paced and quite tactical at the same time and its hard as hell. Even on easy difficulty its quite nice challenge on insane, well its just insane. Graphic are very well made and since background changes and new creeps, facilities and even player armors are availible every few floors it doesn't get dull. The RPG part of the game is very well done with free skill system and choice from three classes. Each class has huge bonus to some starting skills and set of unique advantages but after that it is your choice what skills to improve. Music is not miraculous but good enough and voicing is fun and well made for each class and the in-game encyclopedia. For me, it is one of the best games I played in a while.
Really enjoyed the game. It is quite apparent that someone put lot of thought and effort into making the game. It is a blend of RPG (in that you have separate characters and skill tree for all of them) and tower defence (in that you summon your characters on map to stop waves of attacking creeps) and it blends superbly. And of course then there is the story. It is not very usual for TD games to actually have a story (yes, I can think of few, but it is often too shallow), but Defender's Quest lays out quite nice, epic and funny storytelling. Main characters have distinct personalities and comment on the plot often(actually most of the plot is made out of dialogues). There isn't much in the way of choice on how to make the story progress, but then again - having a good story on a TD game is good enough for me. As the graphic goes - It is quite nice pixel art with enough animations to both look alive and to let player distinguish between different attacks and abilities. Music is also nice. Not great but works with the rest of the game very smoothly. Finally there is negative comment (you do not have to read further if you do not care about security that much): For a game that is DRM-free it needs you to do quite lot of stuff you probably don't want to. Then again you can disable part of it without much effort. 1. It requires you to install Adobe Air. I personally don't like it and it can be seen as potential danger to your PC. There is nothing you can do though. DQ is an Air application. 2.At every start-up it tries to connect to its home website to download updates. You can still play even if it is unable to connect, but there is no option to turn this off. You can disable its internet access through firewall but that makes it one more thing to worry about when you actually want to update - why they don't have a way to opt out auto-updates is a mystery to me. 3.It automatically "tracks anonymous play stats". Which is nice for them, but I only found out there is a way to disable it in the options menu after I completed the game. So, yes, you can disable it, but it is on by default and if you didn't read through whole EULA there is a chance you don't even know about it. All in all it is a very nice game with cool story and great replayability. Only problems are those minor limitations in field of security. I give it 5/5 since I do not find them that problematic - but it would be very nice if creators of this gem thought of that not everyone thinks it is great to send their play data or to connect to internet every time they start an off-line game. One last sentence: Thanks for reading this far and please forgive me those grammatical mistakes I surely did in this review - English is not my native language.
Creators of this game had a perfect understanding of limitations of rpg as a genre and were able to make most of it. You are threw into the story without any extensive narrative, without any idea about the world you are in(unless you know the world of Planescape from DnD or some other source) just to find out that your character has quite severe cause of amnesia. This fact is used as great link between the player and the character as their knowledge of Planscape is pretty much the same at the moment. There is no choice of character, but in this case I say that it is a very good thing as it helps create the atmosphere as well a very personal feel to the story. Class is also given, but can be changed through character's actions later on. The story is very deep and full of suprises(besides Planescape I am not really sure when was the last time I got suprised by story of pc rpg), the NPCs have very believable personalities and their own stories and issues that can be learned and resolved by the player. In-game dialog is at very impressive lenght and is immensely atmosferic and rewarding. Your dialog choices affect most of the game content from story and NPC reactions to availibility of items, special skills and joinable factions. Taking into account the release date and the fact that it uses Infinity engine(the same used by Baldur's Gate) it has very impresive graphics and nice spell effects. Soundtrack is atmosferic and voice acting is very well made. Only thing that can be confusing for modern gamer is gameplay and game feedback. There are lot of quest items which doesnt seem important as well as some items that has virtualy no use at all. Not all important NPCs differ from "filler" ones. Not all plots and quest are clear. However if you think outside the box just a tiny bit and if you are able to embrace a bit older interface, you will be suprised by the game possibilities an RPG can give. If someone made a game with posibilities and story with quality somewhere near Planescape and graphics of modern games, my head would explode. My mind would be completely blown. And you are considering if 10 dollars are suitable price? Go ahead I say - this is THE game.
Master of Orion 2 was the best turn-based space strategy I ever played. It might even be the best of all strategy games I played. Considering this I was very happy when the sequel, MoO3, came out. The fact they did not include my favorite race(anyone else is up for the cliche and thinks that matriarchal space elves are in fact quite cool?) made me a bit sad but couldn't spoil my enthusiasm. The story I found in the manual and on the net was great. When I installed the game I started playing I was quite enthralled by the graphic and the race selection and creation system was nice step forward as it included even more racial traits and abilities as well as many interesting pre-created civilizations. Problems started when I got into the actual gema interface. It sucked. Even with all its nice graphic and plain charming design it seemed like interface used in text games - I have never seen something so user-unfriendly. The race and planet simulation was quite nice, but research screens were too complex for the very little features they offered. The same could be said about the galaxy map. The combination of somewhere simplified game math and choices and complexified interface made this game into what I dare call the worst strategy game I ever played.
