G4TV

Everyone loves a finger-cramper. Diablo may be one of the most intellectually vapid lawn mowing simulations ever released, but it lived on my hard drive for years, followed by a half-court press of better (and worse) imitators. Each plugged its feature hooks then trotted out the loot grabs bracketed by trite stories about devils, dragons, or both. Monte Cristo’s Silverfall wants a piece of that pedigree, but not badly enough, apparently, because it saddles an otherwise routine RPG mouse-masher with unreasonable glitches and silly design choices.

Me and My Camera

Your big what-to-do this time involves saving Silverfall, a city besieged by the latest monster mash and from which you’ve fled as the game opens. You start in an ad hoc exile camp pitched in the middle of a swamp with the usual cast of quest-givers and weapons/armor/potions dealers who dawdle like vending machines. As a human/elf/goblin/troll you’re supposed to scout the area, tag companions (you can have up to two), then transit to new areas, cities, and dungeons as you tick off quests to advance the story or run sidewise errands for extra scratch and stat pickups.

Before you get to any of that, however, you’ll have to wrestle with simply moving at all. In competition for “wonkiest design choice ever,” the mini-map arrow follows your camera’s facing, not your hero’s, which makes the very basics of getting around (much less with finesse) tantamount to operating a vehicle with two steering wheels. Want a front or sideways battle view? Risky business in Silverfall, because thanks to the inverse navigation system, you’re never precisely certain which way you’ll jog if you have to dash, and monsters spawn thick as weeds, making careless scampering deadly. You can sort of adapt to it after a few hours, but shaking off the sense of driving two things at once is tougher than beating down a Necrophage (one of the game’s uglier mini-bosses) with your bare hands.

Complementing the movement interface’s badness is a gamey mechanic where creatures level up as you do within each zone (it’s supposed to make an already tough game tougher, I suppose). Consequently you have to beeline through an area to tag distant quest markers, or hang around the periphery of your temporary “base” wailing on bad guys until you’ve cleared the requisite dozen or so levels. It’s an idea that worked only tolerably well in a wide-open game like Oblivion—in Silverfall’s endless combat imbroglios, it’s a nightmare, where fighting the same-only-tougher creatures kneecaps any real sense of progression. Muddying that sense is like putting a stake through the heart of this genre.

Skillful

But okay, some good stuff. Take the skill system, which for the record includes “combat” and “magic” with branching skills you level up to clear prerequisites and feed underlying concepts like dodging, parrying, and shooting, or all the fire/ice/wind spell variants that form the genre’s fantasy vocabulary. Silverfall adds “nature” and “technology,” giving you access to a range of steampunky abilities like neural mods, acid blood, mechanical slaves, lycanthropy—even radiation—which, based on your choices, influence the course of the plot (call it Monte Cristo’s stab at “ecological awareness”). Granted, “influence” here amounts to alternative quests, and in the end nearly all of those abilities are just spells or melee boosts with fancy names.

None of this gets any better online, but if you’d rather share with friends the pain this game dishes out in large measure, what better way than a little co-op or player-versus-player? Campaign mode lets you play co-op style, but makes you roll a new character and limits quests to whoever spawns the game, but nixes PvP, and offers no way to veto your quest-giving head poobah. Free mode on the other hand drops the main quest and lets you play with any previously created character (you can set restrictions), allying with or challenging other players for side quests on your own terms. If you bother with Silverfall at all, stick with free mode, because PvP questing’s more interesting.

Bug Out

What really kills Silverfall, though, are the bugs. Big ones, like game crashes. Little ones, like interface bars that needlessly overlap crucial interface readouts. But mostly a steady stream of random flub-ups, like critical left- or right-click action buttons (for quick-switching melee, ranged, and magic) that disappear off the interface bar and take a reload to fix. Watch inventory items vanish mysteriously while trading with vendors. Click on areas you can see (but which aren’t traversable) and instead of ignoring you as he/she should, your hero lunges in the opposing direction (you’ll want to be in an area bounded in large part by impassable terrain to truly appreciate the inanity of this one). Creatures frequently collapse on top of items, rendering them difficult or impossible to get at, and thick foliage sometimes stops you from hitting an enemy with no visible indicator, leading you to clumsily waste clicks and hasten an untimely demise.

To put it politely, Silverfall was released much too soon and (one can only hope) with too little tester feedback. Fix the navigation system, ease back on the creature auto-leveling, patch the game, and you’d be closer to something that rated three or even four stars than this unfortunate mess of a Diablo wannabe.

Article by: Matt Peckham