Starting off in the Underworld, you don’t remember your name, and you don’t know why you’re here. But hey, if there’s any time to choose a nickname for your character, this was a good time to do so. Straight away the story ties into choosing your name for your character, after you press play. This was a smooth transition, and I’m impressed. This game, is exactly what the title suggests. It is a Voxel Based 3D Role Playing Game, which quite frankly caught my eye. Here I will be documenting my experiences with this game.
Once you’ve passed the name choosing screen, you’re taken to a “Character Properties” screen. This lets you change your appearance, your profession and your weapon. These are very well thought of, as there are a huge variety of Professions, and each profession has a unique set of weapons to choose from, and also benefit from different abilities and stats. Once you’ve completed these, you attempt to break free from being dead. And the God of the underworld lets you, on ONE condition. This is where you choose your winning criteria, and it gives you many options to choose from. This is very unique, this game has had a lot of thought put into it, and I can already feel the passion the developers had while making the game. While this is the case, the game still has a lot to be desired, unfortunately. The premise, the ideas and the general atmosphere of the game has been done well. The idea of how you come back to life, to choose your characters (which is disguised as remembering your character), helps with immersion greatly. This was a great design choice, in my opinion.
The movement and hunting are clunky, and it feels like the game has been designed for controller only, as if you use keyboard and mouse, you would assume it would be best for any kind of shooting, like the hunting feature of the game. The hunting feature gives you a bow and arrow, and you shoot animals to collect their meat. Using this food, you use food points to go out adventuring, which is a nice balance to the game. So the basic idea of the game is to collect food, and use the food to adventure and go to other towns. This is interesting, and makes the game more of a challenge. For the hunting feature, I would have liked to either have a cross-hair, or have something on the bow to help aim. Where the arrow hits, is quite far from where the arrow sits in the bow, so it takes a lot of tries to land a hit. While that’s the case, it could just be a design to make the game more difficult, as archery in reality is actually really difficult. For the actual combat in the game, it’s completely different and is similar to many RPG games. Turn based attacking. This feature works very well, and the scrolling effect of your abilities is very nice to see. Effort has been put into this feature.
In this game, you can ask NPC characters to join your party. Depending on your profession of choice, this can alter the amount of people, and how effective these people are in your team. Some people require you to have certain people in your team. Some NPC characters may only join you, if you have a leader in your team, for example. This is an interesting feature, as it means that you have to meet requirements to have more people. This also helps with immersion, as if an NPC joins you with no question, that wouldn’t be very immersive, as people aren’t easily swayed like that, in real life.
The art style is very nice, and is reminiscent of the styles of games like Cube World. In fact, the characters look very similar to the ones in Cube World, so if you like the style of that game, you may like this one also. The enemy models are well done, and are recognizable. If not, they will have a pop-up menu that will tell you what the monster is, anyway. While the models are done great, I feel like there is a lot needed to make the game feel more realistic. Even though it’s voxel based, lighting can do a great job in making the game more immersive. It seems like there’s a sort of 3d glasses looking to each of the levels, but it outlines each object in a red offset, and then a green offset on the other side. This looks like 3D glasses technology, but I do not think it is. But it’s not very pretty to look at, and I would like the option to remove it. Another issue would be how objects render in the distance, they seem to render with a huge whitish colour, and then render in the full colours of the objects. What would be best in this game, would be an option to change more advanced options, for example how far the render distance is, or to turn off this weird red/green.
I have found that using both Controller and Keyboard and mouse, that the controls are very clunky, and it’s very difficult to figure out what button to use in certain situations. While that’s the case, it DOES give you an onscreen button guide on what to press, but this is a little bit intrusive. I would like to have the option to remove this, after I get more used to the controls. Using a controller is much better suited to this game, but when you do use keyboard and mouse, I’d like these guide icons at the bottom to respectively change, to the buttons used on the keyboard. As there is not that many buttons to use in this game, you would expect that it wouldn’t take too long to do this.
The music is very nice, and very relevant to certain situations. The desert dungeon level plays a kind of middle eastern inspired theme. The title screen music is very catchy too, and I very much enjoyed it. So I have no faults with the music at all, in this game. The sounds that play when you fight, and when you win the battle are great to hear, and sound inspired by old games such as The Legend Of Zelda and Final Fantasy victory sounds.
When I got into the game, I found it fun to run about, shooting pigs and catching fish. The fishing feature is nice, you set your line up, your fish bites, and you reel in and catch the fish. It’s a nice varied way to get raw food, to then cook before you leave. This is great, and I found it pretty fun to be catching food, even with the clunky game play. While the game play is pretty clunky, I have found that if you’re close to an animal, the bow locks on to it, to make it an easier shot. I find this to be too easy at times, but compared to how difficult it is to aim yourself, I bet that’s the reason it was added. If there was a crosshair, I’d have a much better time. The battle feature itself, is very very impressive. You can attack, and it gives you an input chance to time perfectly to actually hit the shot. This is fun to play, but if you keep attacking, you’ll use up your energy and have to rest!
I found that the optimization of the game could need some improvement, as sometimes I found that I got quite bad lag spikes and the whole game became blurry and the graphics messed up, as well as the frame rate seeming to lower. This was unfortunate, and I hope it can be fixed.
In conclusion, I found that the game seems to have a lot of effort and passion put into it, and while that’s the case, there are still some issues that may need some attention. The game is still fun to play, and I appreciate that it has a lot of inspirations from older games, and for those reasons I think that the game has a lot of charm, especially how they tie character creation with immersion, the way this game did. While it is a fun game to play, there were a few issues I encountered, which can be immersion breaking and/or can ruin the fun of the game. Hopefully they fix these issues, but until then I will be giving it a rating. I give this game a 6/10, but if the features and issues I spoke about were fixed, it may just be a 7/10.
REVIEW CODE: A complimentary PC code was provided to Brash Games for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to editor@brashgames.co.uk.
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