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Date |
: Nov 12th, 2001 |
| Genre |
: Strategy |
| Developer |
: Nival Interactive |
| Author |
: Multiple |
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Etherlords Beta Review
Hi and welcome to my Etherlords beta review. First of all I might say that, contrary to a friend of mine who thought the game was about drug wars, this game is not the same type of RTS or RPG you have played before, but it's more like a blend of the 2 genres.
After a so-so story and a cool but choppy graveyard intro you get no idea what you are going to do... which is good for me since I like surprises 8).
At the beginning of the game, quite reminiscent of games a la C&C, you start to wonder how in the world it's possible that this demo weights 1 GIGABYTE to download and 1.5 Gigabytes after you install it. Maybe they wanted to make sure that the game wasn't pirated or just wanted to go straight to Guinness Book of World Records >=)
As soon as you go into battle you'll se why the D/L is so big, you enter an awesome battleground. It actually reminded me of FF7 but with WAY better graphics and animations. You'll battle one wizard against another casting spells and summoning creatures to help you, but more on that later.
Sound-wise, the music is awesome... nice tracks, but the voice acting is so repetitive, at least at the beginning when you have just a couple of spells, that you want to turn the audio off.
Controls are easy but not very intuitive on the beginning, again with some resemblance to FF7's turn-based fight engine. I really liked the right-click info button on the mouse, but I would have appreciated a bunch of options a-la Home World. And while the game has an auto attack option, the fact is that you feel that you have little control by using it and the AI is not smart enough casting spells.
This game really takes a lot of your system, so get ready to have a decent machine to run it. My system specs are at the end of the article for you to compare, and I can say it ran silky smooth with all settings maxed out and 1024x768 resolution. But after I entered the Task Manager I just saw that the game was taking about 220MB of my system RAM. Thank God it comes cheap these days 8). I have experienced NO crashes or strange bugs so far, no missing textures, and no glitches of any kind, except a little lack of synchronization in some spells that seem to hit before they were thrown by the enemy, so I take my hat off on this department, but not every beta-tester has been so lucky, according to the news groups.
On a final word I see a nice future for this game... It's really cool looking's, nice music and original game play will hook people by the masses, and since the game runs quite well, I hope they fine tune it enough to make it awesome.
- Adnel Ortiz
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