บทวิจารณ์ล่าสุดโดย Swayles McSpoobin

I wanted to like this game. I seriously did - since Event Horizon showed that they could do interesting combat scenarios with Tower of Time, but this... it just falls apart after the first hour or so. Between the bland level design, unbalanced combat, uninteresting story and bugginess of the game, it's disappointing.

First, the level design - gone are the interesting levels from Tower of Time that have lots of nooks and crannies to explore. They're replaced with square-ish rooms connected by long hallways. Outside of two levels in the game, there aren't any puzzles to solve, no interesting side content, no real reason to explore the full breadth of an area outside of gathering more materials. It also doesn't help that the areas are littered with traps and other hazards (such as explosive barrels) that aren't really positioned in a way that they can be utilized in combat (as most are situated outside of combat arenas). They end up being more of a nuisance more than anything else, as your characters have a very bad tendency to wander into them, despite having an option to prevent such a thing from happening (more on that later). Every area is just wandering from one room to the next to get into yet another combat scenario where you can witness how unbalanced classes are.

In Dark Envoy, not all DPS classes are made equal - far, far from it. I had one of the two main characters set up as a Blademaster, which absolutely outpaced every single other DPS character I had by miles. This was only compounded by the fact that it was extremely easy to get said character up to 100% critical hit rate and an attack speed that was hilarious in comparison to what other classes could do. It got to the point where I was resolving most combat scenarios in record time - and this included the final boss, who I took out in roughly 30 seconds despite their huge health pool. I did like the fact that you could only bring 5 skills into combat for each character and that you can pretty much respec your point distribution at any time. However, once you really get an idea for what you want each character to do, there really wasn't any incentive to put points into anything else, so for the last handful of levels, I was just randomly distributing them. Stats also felt like they were contributing very little to my party's combat prowess after a while, considering how strong gear can get.

The equipment you find in this game is rather boring - granted, I did like how the different types (Elven vs. Imperial, etc.) affected the stats, but the differences tended to be rather minute, so I mainly stuck with Elven gear for its mana regen. The real power came from the additional effects that could roll during item crafting - and the enchantment system. These proved to be the breaking point, since it was easy to craft gear that was far more powerful than you could find, making exploration nigh useless after you get enough materials for a tier to freely craft whatever you need. For instance, it was easier to craft gear that pushed your skill power to ridiculous levels, which made the Elementalist specialty far more powerful than any other mage specialization. Which brings me to my next point... the hazards.

Many of the magic spells in this game leave a DoT damage field on the ground after the initial effect - which is normally all fine and dandy. But the major exception to this is if you have the "avoid hazards" pathfinding option on - which doesn't work outside of combat, but becomes a major crutch in combat scenarios. You see, even if it's a damage field that ultimately doesn't hurt your party members (as it's one that's cast by your own party member), your characters will find the longest path around to avoid them, sometimes traveling the entire circumference of an arena to do so. So most of the time, you're having to wrangle your party members into more advantageous positions, except the autonomous setups (that aren't really configurable, by the way) you can set will override your decision almost immediately and they'll be back on their leisurely 5 mile jog while your weaker party members get pummeled. I wouldn't have much problem with all this if it was in service of a better story.

You see, this game has a really, really bad habit of making your party the errand boy for the vast majority of the game. Instead of finding interesting ways to piecemeal out plot information, your party, more often than not just goes "Well, let's go see what other errands we can run for these two groups that absolutely hate our guts." I literally screamed after a certain point when, after a major plot point was revealed, instead of going "we should follow up on that", Malakai was all "let's see what other errands we can run!" It's frustrating, since the story did not feel like it was in service of a game as long as this one. It felt more like they sat down and said, "Okay, we're making a 30 hour RPG" first and foremost without thinking of a plot that could fill in that time. Plus the amount of times the game teases you with a plot twist only to go "sorry, but I can't tell you about that right now" is numerous. Gah! The story lets you make a lot of potential choices throughout, but they all carry very little weight, as only a handful have any impact on the plot and who your last party member is. Plus there's ties back into Tower of Time, but they all feel very superficial and only there as a wink and a nod. Now, even with a weak story and weak gameplay, I can still sometimes wrangle some enjoyment out of a game, but the instability of this game brought it low.

It became a common occurrence for me to run this with the task manager on my second monitor, as the game had a real bad habit of hard locking and refusing to go underneath any other program I had open. There was no real rhyme or reason to when these hard locks occurred, but they happened frequently enough that I dreaded playing more than 1-2 hours at a time. It also doesn't help that this game takes a couple minutes to initially load, even off of a higher end SSD. Plus it had a bad habit of not properly rendering the skin on characters with full-faced helmets on in scenes where their helmets aren't displayed (like the party selection screen), leaving them to be a solid grey husk. There was also an issue with a character showing up in cutscenes with glowing swords glued to their hands.

For this verison being a "Director's Cut", it certainly could have used a bit more time in the oven. I hope that if Event Horizon makes a third RPG, they can take some lessons from this and Tower of Time and make something more in line with ToT than this.

Just to preface this, I don't normally like posting negative reviews for smaller indie titles, because I know how hard it is to make games and promote them. However I felt like I needed to speak out after my time with this, so lord, where to start with this mess?

First off - I will fully admit to two things. 1) After about a quarter of the way through the game, I started skipping every single dialogue that popped up. This mainly was because the dialogue was so inane and pandering (and I get that the latter is the *point* here) that I felt like I scraping the bottom of the Ao3 barrel. 2) I shut off the music and sound effects a hour or two in - while the compositions I did hear were decent, they quickly became repetitive, and the menu sound effects reminded me too much of Earthbound for some reason.

However, my biggest beef with this game is the balance - or lack thereof. You see, there's a passage I remember reading in the Bard's Tale Construction Kit manual years ago that talked about balance. It was about how yes, you can make a weapon that does 10d100 damage or a combat that has 99 mega-orcs in it, but after a certain point, it starts to become an arms race as to who can build the better weapon or monster. The developers obviously never had kept that in mind here, because after roughly the halfway point in the main story - and very much so in the late game and post game parts - it 100% does become an arms race.

The gear you start finding from combats (which I did appreciate that the game was rather liberal with its drops, considering that the majority of your gear upgrades come from that) starts eclipsing what gains you make from leveling up. While I know this is true for most JRPGs and games made in that mold, it started to become absurd in the post-game. I was finding myself in situations where I was finding gear that was twice as powerful as the gear I had found in the previous area, which in and of itself was twice as powerful as the gear before it. These weren't small numbers either - it was very common for gear to go from +100 defense to +200 defense to +400 defense in the span of a mere 30 or so minutes. While I understand that getting those big boosts does produce an endorphin rush (believe me, I know, I love the Disgaea series for that), it starts to make leveling up feel useless. Considering the fact that you need to manually distribute stat and skill points after every level gain, it starts to become extremely tedious to take care of.

On the other side of this arms race issue, it's the enemies. You start by facing small groups of enemies - 1-2, rarely 3, but as your party grows and you progress, it's not uncommon to face groups of 6-8 enemies by the endgame. While this isn't so much of a problem in and of itself, the fact of the matter is is that enemies start to become so powerful and tanky by the end, that AoE spells start to take precedence over single target spells. This is mainly because if you don't eliminate them quickly enough, they can and will absolutely tear your party apart - it's very common to see weaker party members get 1-2 shotted in the endgame and post-game areas.

To exacerbate this issue, there really isn't many build pathways for your characters - or combat options for that matter. Sure, the game does tell you that you can distribute your points freely, but here's the rub - not all characters gain the same benefits from the same stats (outside of two characters you get in the post-game). Ryuu, for instance, gains more from a single point in strength than Luna does and vice versa for intelligence. While most characters have both a physical and magical set of abilities, there really isn't a point to beefing up both. As far as abilities go, beyond the two that I already mentioned, you have a set of buffs and debuffs (which the latter never, ever work in the situations where you'd want to use them in), along with some status effect spells (which, much like the debuffs, are quite useless in the situations where you'd want them to work). Each character also has a set of passives that grant such a small stat benefit that they may as well not even exist. That's it, no means of diverting or mitigating damage, no clever tricks or gimmicks, no planning or strategy, every combat becomes a pure rushdown by the end. It's a tiring experience. Plus there's an ailment resistance stat that I didn't know existed until after I beat the final story boss, as the only gear that affects it doesn't start dropping until the post-game (and before you ask, no, there are no buffs that affect that stat).

To not be entirely negative on this game, there are a few things that I liked. The main thing is the fact that you can fully respec your characters at any point for free. Also, I did really enjoy the fact that the game is rather breezy in terms of progression - a new piece of gear or a new level was *always* right around the corner. That alone kept me going through the entire game, and something I find a lot of indie RPGs sorely lacking, so good job there. Also, the art was mostly good - some of the characters felt like the artist(s) had dived into a few too many "how to draw fantasy anime" books and some of the enemies were a touch on the horny side. Overall, I'd say the art was much easier to deal with in this than it is in a lot of games that go down the anime-inspired route for character designs.

However, none of those facts could wash the extremely bitter taste of the unbalanced, boring combat and wonky gear progression from my mouth.

I'm going to be blunt and upfront about something here before I say anything else about the game.

This game is jank.

However, it's jank in the way that random shareware dungeon crawler you'd grab off of somewhere like Tucows or Softpedia in the late 90s was. I mean this in an absolutely, totally, without a hint of irony good way. Yes, the graphics don't inspire much in the way of confidence. Yes, the music is all MIDIs (or at least sounds like a 90s MIDI track). Yes, all the sound effects sound like they were made by the dev making random noises with their mouth.

But... this all fits with the style that I (hope) the dev is intentionally going for. They all work together to make an experience that, quite frankly, has been lost to time. This is especially true in this day and age where indie titles have a lot more spit-shine polish than indie titles did some 20-odd years ago, and this pretty much nails that experience.

The dungeon levels (so far) haven't been all that big, but they've had some minor puzzle solving - nothing too brain-busting, but amusing so far. The writing has been rather nice - granted, it's also filled with puns and dad jokes (my friends and I have certainly groaned at some of the enemy names when I've streamed this), but it has made me laugh more than once, which is more than what a lot of games do these days. The combat, however, is a bit unbalanced, as I've taken down the last few bosses without much issue (but then again, this is taking a lot of inspiration from the Enroth trilogy of Might and Magic games, which were hardly balanced in and of themselves). Although I will admit that the game weighs how damage is calculated against resistances better than a lot of modern RPGs.

As a fan of the later-era MIght and Magic games, I do like the skill system - and how it provides a nice secondary means of character development. You (or at least I could) definitely feel a nice increase in power once a character jumps up in skill tiers from expert to master and so on and so forth. Granted, this may all level out in the end, since I am getting to a point where the numbers are getting much bigger than the were at the start.

The enemy variety in this game is rather large, from what I've seen and a lot of the weirder variety of enemies are definitely in the "this came out of a fever dream" territory. I do appreciate that the traits for enemies are randomized to a degree, so that keeps me on my toes instead of just mowing through the same enemies over and over and over again. I can't wait to see what else this game has in store for enemies considering some of the stuff I've seen in screenshots and on the loading screens.

Overall, if you're looking to recapture the feeling of playing the aforementioned janky (in a good way) indie shareware RPGs of the late 90s, then go for it, you won't regret it. But if you don't know what I'm talking about, I would still recommend this game, with the caveat that it's going to feel a bit off, but still be rather enjoyable despite that. It's not like some of the more jankier RPGs I've seen on here where it falls apart the moment you look at it funny (because this game is spending too much time looking at the player funny).

I want to like this game more than I do, because it does some good things, but those good things are negated by a lot of annoyances. There's roughly 60% of a good game here - because there's sound mechanically sound ideas here, they just don't cross the finish line.

Let me break it down:

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-- I do like the fact that you have full control over your party creation, along with a variety of races and classes to use. Each race has its own advantages and disadvantages, however, due to the abundance of gear (which I'll be discussing later), a lot of these advantages & disadvantages are negated (outside of any bonuses/penalties to experience gain). Maybe these bonuses/penalties become more important beyond the 8 or so hours I put into this, but I felt like my characters could have been any class/race combo and had succeeded. Which, for a game that has no real story, makes me feel like I'm dealing with 4 blank slates instead of characters I've built up into a deadly squad.

-- While I do appreciate the amount and variety of gear presented, it just feels... meh. It didn't take me very long to start finding gear that increased resistance (or outright rendered a character immune) to various status effects or gave a decent increase to some elemental resistances. Considering that a few races get a bonus to some element resistance at the cost of some penalty, having easy access that spreads that all characters, regardless of their starting race, it starts to make those bonuses feel a bit... useless. Granted, those gear-based resistances can be stacked, but even then, I never encountered any situations where those resistances felt meaningful. Again, maybe beyond the areas I explored (I made it to Midport, in case anyone is curious) they start coming into play more. As it stood, more often than not, I was being showered with gear from combat and quests that was worse than what I had equipped.

-- Item drops from combat are kind of a mess - in the early stages of the game (like in the Gnoll Cave), it's not uncommon to receive 10-15 different items after combat. I know this is probably to alleviate some of the stress of having to get a lot of early game crafting items, but it's just overwhelming, considering the sheer amount of items I had in my inventory. This started to thin out after the opening dungeons, but even then, it still felt silly.

-- I like crafting systems, and I do like the fact that you can make a lot of stuff in this game, but the sheer amount of craftable items is just, again, like the combat drops, kinda silly. When a good chunk of the items you can craft have duplicate uses (and most of the non-potion consumables are better utilized as quest turn-ins than anything else), it creates another "why bother?" issue. Like why include all the basic weapon/armor pieces for a specific material when, by the time you can actually mine those materials, they're practically useless, even from a vendor trash standpoint.

-- The quest design in this game is... very, very bad. I don't mind having a plotless game (as I'm a very big fan of the SaGa series, which the plots of which take a very distant backseat to gameplay and mechanics), but considering that all the quests I found were literally "get me (X) of (Y)" (sometimes not even getting the amount needed other than 'some'), it just made me feel like a group of errand runners than adventurers. Just because there isn't an overarching plot to this game doesn't mean there can't be smaller plots in some of the areas (especially with the reputation system in place). It would stand to give some purpose to putting our nose to the grindstone (as the game quite literally tells you to do if you talk to the information NPC in the starting town) other than "just do it."

-- Backtracking. Holy cow, the backtracking. Considering that you move at roughly half the speed of town movement while in dungeons, it makes going back through places (which happens quite often, as towns are separated by them) very excruciating. Doubly so considering that most of the time, I was powerful enough to chew through combat with very little reward when I did have to backtrack. By the time I got to Kelece and explored the mines near it, I was thinking "is this really worth it to trudge back through these dungeons to turn in these quests?" (as it turns out, yes, it was, because the gear I got from them was way overpowered, but I can easily imagine plenty of times when the answer to that question is "no").

-- A lot of minor bugs and annoyances. There were plenty of times when I saw spelling/grammar issues that would have easily been caught with an editing pass. For example, I encountered multiple enemies with all lowercase names. I also encountered multiple NPCs that while a dialogue box popped up for them, had empty text boxes. I also had multiple instances where open treasure chests would reset their state, allowing me to open them and collect their contents again. When you take the ship to/from Southport, the ship will snap back to what I assume is whatever the center coordinates for that scene right before it fades out. And one I found particularly annoying is when you talk to ship captains, the confirmation choice is to refuse travel - if you cancel out of it, you actually go on the boat trip.

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I wouldn't be so harsh on this game if it was the dev's freshman or sophomore effort, but considering that they have put out a number of RPGs before this is making me wonder if they learned anything from previous projects. I know this is a solo dev effort (as the game says so), but even then, a bit of polish and refinement would make this game a whole lot better. Plus with the $20 retail price, it's asking a bit much considering most games of this sort go for $10-15 - I know people have to recuperate their dev costs and deal with Steam's cut and all that, but... it's still a bit of tough swallow.

Rubbish, pure and simple - it took what was an *extremely* enjoyable base game (one that I sunk nearly 20 hours into in the span of two days even!) and turned it into a tedious crawl. Enemies that require specific damage types to even properly harm, long - prohibitively long, even - treks between campfires and storage chests, a confusing map that's a pain to get through, you name it. Yeah, the inclusion of two more link towers *does* ease the travel issue a bit, but still, when you stuff more enemies into one small section of the map than there are in the larger sections of the base game's map, it isn't very fun to traverse. Avoid until they make further passes on it.

Awkward AI, horrendous graphical pop-in (even with all the settings on high), a weak skill system, extremely sluggish combat. Need I say more?

lol unksippable cutscenes in a kmmo

A rather pale shade of, and if anything, a stain upon the EDF franchise. This game takes what would normally be a lengthy, harrowing bug-splattering adventure and condenses down into a mere 15 boring, repetitive stages. Whereas a normal EDF game would continually roll out bigger and bigger menaces, this just throws out a handful and calls it a day. Even then, the ones that it does roll out never really feel like a threat, say, like the spider queens in mainline EDFs, or the long-range hectors. Rarely do you face anything more than 15-20 enemies at a time, and even then, you're never really put in the same danger as you would be as if you were facing off against a threat like 15 silver ants in the later stages of EDF 4/5.

The weapons themselves, a highlight of the EDF series with its wide variety and stark differences between the classes, also gets spit in its face here. Instead of having wild energy weapons, pneumatic fists, a 12 barreled shotgun, you have endless repeats of assault rifles, shotguns, rocket launchers and other rather sundry weapon types. They bare very little difference between the tiers other than "this one is stronger", which granted, is also a problem in mainline EDF. However, mainline EDF doesn't lock its weapons behind a tedious level system - getting your first 2 ranks in any class doesn't take that long, but after that, it becomes a slog, even when playing on higher difficulties, which net you more points.

Only pick this up if you've played through the entirety of EDF 4, 5, and Iron Rain and are looking for more, but even then, that's a very, very shaky recommendation. If you're seeking more EDF after that, just replay 4 or 5, you'll be doing yourself a favor.

Normally I don't like calling games bad because even flawed games can be fun, but this game, this game is bad. I know that this game is from 13 years ago, but even then, there's not much positive to take away from this experience. Granted, I never played the original outside of the demo, and even then, my memories of that are so hazy that I couldn't even tell you what it was like then. The number of missteps this game takes is rather mind-boggling, to say the least.

The combat is boring - which is incredibly important for a game where that's pretty much the meat of what the game is. The loot is equally boring - the items you find may have plenty of stats, but at the same time, none of them felt like they did *anything* - which the power ramp in any Diablo clone is core to the experience, just as much as the combat. The scaling I found to be rather weak, with enemies barely being tougher at level 10 than they were at level 1 - even for the rare/unique enemies a player can face. Because of that, I faced very little difficulty, and it just made the entire experience a snoozefest instead of one that I wanted to push on and do more, or even explore other classes. I would also fault the side quests, but then again, this is a Diablo clone, so there really isn't much you can do with those outside of "kill/collect x of y" quests. I could keep going, but I'd be here all day.

Even if you have nostalgic memories of the original game, I'd still advise you to avoid this game, as there are many better Diablo clones on the market these days - and for cheaper. For everyone else, spend your time and money on other, better games. I implore you.

P.S. - if you for some reason *do* decide to play the game: skip the tutorial. By *god* is the English in it incredibly stilted and so, so very obviously added in when it became a Korean F2P game. Good lord, I just wanted to die after reading the "dialogue" the tutorial characters were spitting out at me. It's rather amazing in how brokebrained it all comes across as.