Drakensang: The Dark Eye
Review
Doesn't quite reach its potential
by Marcus Mulkins
reviewed on PC
About that annoying stuff... (cntd.)
Speaking of spells, why is it that no matter how capable your magic-user becomes, he can't master a Teleportation spell? [SPOILER] This becomes particularly pertinent because _repeatedly_ through the story, just as your party achieves some critical item, the Bad Guy(s) pop in to snatch the item you spent hours to acquire, and then pop back out before you can react. That, to my mind, is incredibly cheesy deus ex machina.
Next comes what I consider to be the game's biggest Achilles' heel. That being that the story is INCREDIBLY linear. I can understand a storyline where event D follows event C and never the other way around. But this game goes so far as to make it impossible to ever step out of the timeline. In Oblivion and Fallout 3, you have a very large gameboard to explore, and you're allowed to go back to locations to see what you missed in your initial investigation. Drakensang's simple approach is that once you finish a chapter and leave a given location (other than Ferdok), that location becomes locked and you can never go back there. (I guess it would have taken too much additional programming to allow those locations to remain dynamic. That is, if you've finished with the main quest there, the NPCs no longer have anything to talk about.) I must acknowledge, however, that there are usually at least a half-dozen side quests available at each non-Ferdok location. Just make sure you finished ALL of them before departure. Ultimately, this aspect also affects its replayability because, once you’ve played through the main quest, in any replay you would already know EXACTLY what happens next. About the only value of a replay is to go looking for any side quests that you may have missed.
In the absence of a detailed walkthrough or strategy manual, I find one of the things that quickly gets annoying is when a player MUST go pixel-hunting on every screen. As when you are looking for any useful items that may be lying around. Most fantasy characters just happen to be kleptomaniacs. Actually, when you get right down to it, most fantasy games are actually about acquiring stuff. You start with a very limited amount of stuff. You pick stuff up, or kill opponents and then loot the bodies. You shlepp that stuff over to a merchant where you sell all that stuff just so you can get the money to buy better stuff. Repeat often. The thing about Drakensang is that you are shown some really detailed rooms, with piles and piles of delectable stuff - which you can't touch. Except for maybe that ONE book, parked in a bookcase of umpteen dozen other non-interactive books. Which is the ONE that you want/need? The only way to find it is to roll the mouse cursor over that ONE in a hundred books, literally. Or it may be a smashable barrel (the container of choice in this game) that you're looking for. You'll have a screen with scores of barrels shown - but the only ones that you find things in are the ones where the cursor changes shape to look like a sword. (How silly is that, continuously going around punching out barrels just to see what's inside?) It gets to be real annoying, seeing a screen with all sorts of juicy potential collectibles, only to discover that NONE of the objects shown can be interacted with. Or worse, to later learn that you managed to miss the one object that you vitally needed, despite the five minutes of pixel-hunting you did.
From small pebbles...
There are quite a few other annoying components to the game which, individually are not enough to make you out and out dislike the game. But collectively, they add up to quite a bit of annoyance. The one I'll cite in closing is, once you've saved the world from annihilation, what do you do for an encore?
7.0
fun score
No Pros and Cons at this time
