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Action-RPG in the style of "hack & slash", released exclusively for the Macintosh platform and, apparently, designed to become a response to the already existing (and, by the way, ported to Mac in the same year) Diablo. At the same time, this thing is quite original, and a few reviewers even compared it with (at that time) the dilogy of the strategy games Myth, although the similarity in the games is purely external. The plot is surprisingly large-scale - but at the same time it has only a distant relation to the game itself: you should not expect any rich "line" or branched dialogues. The action takes place in Akroma, a fantasy world; his region called "Northern lands" (Northernlands) is ruled by the evil and cruel wizard Sortok, who sends all the unwanted into the world (apparently - to a separate world) called "Agora", inhabited by all sorts of villains, from which it is impossible to get out. One fine day, Cameran, once the commander of Sortok, together with his detachment, rebelled against the master, but was defeated; he and all his soldiers are sent to that very "Agora". The player, somewhat unexpectedly, is invited to play the role of not Camerana at all, but one of his soldiers. "Agora" is a very strange world. It does not consist of the usual (at least for the same Diablo ) map-locations, but of seamless "globes", a kind of spherical zones, of which there are several in the game. To move from one such sphere to another, it is necessary to find (in parts) a special key, after which something like teleportation takes place, but within the zone itself there are no separate locations - this is precisely that a single space, and a closed one (going forward all the time, we are in eventually return to the original point). A very important role is played by strange-looking columns - oracles (one per "sphere"): if a character dies, he is reborn near such an oracle; if the enemies manage to destroy the oracle, then the death of the character means the end of the game. The combat element almost completely dominates the role-playing and even more the quest one (the latter is completely absent): the basis of the gameplay is made up of "primitive" advancement, battles with opponents using melee weapons or magic (battles, by the way, are objectively difficult) and collection (not even search, namely collection) of useful items, among which there will be parts of keys, sometimes found in vessels, and sometimes literally falling out of killed enemies. Yes, before starting the game, you can choose one of six different races for your character (good or not, but they are all humanoid, and five out of six are just people), each of which has different indicators of physical strength, speed, health reserve, possession of weapons, the ability to fight in armor, as well as the ability to magic, of which there are four in the game. Trying to make the game a "worthy opponent" for Diablo , the creators added multiplayer to it (and advertised as much as possible even in the user manual) - including through the Apple Talk service. Now you can hardly say anything about him; judging by the description, we tried (announced support for up to 10 players at the same time), but whether someone played it in this way is unknown. Graphics are quite reminiscent of the famous Myth series: the same "three-dimensional isometry" with monotonous textures and the ability to zoom the camera, but it also added the ability to fully rotate the latter during the battle. At the same time, the catastrophically small number of environmental objects on the screen and the general monotony of the color palette are positively depressing, and very much moreover. If you add to this enough, to put it mildly, a strange manner of movement of the character, then some absolutely terrible picture will appear: a certain pseudo-three-dimensional, but, let's be honest, a not very detailed warrior wanders along an empty green landscape, where occasionally you come across a tree, a hill, an evil a skeleton or, say, a pot with something useful - and sometimes it seems that we are not even playing a full-fledged and finished game. |
