Silverfall review (PC)

Blizzard Entertainment has a lot to answer for. In Diablo the studio created the computer game equivalent of Helen of Troy: the game that launched a thousand clones. There seems to be at least one every year – hack-and-slash fantasy RPGs which borrow, with varying degrees of shamelessness, from Blizzard’s classic. Pretenders to a throne they will never obtain because the response is always the same – Diablo was better.

Enter French developers Monte Cristo, which has clearly decided that what PC gamers really want to accompany their tooth-fur removal medicine is yet another adventure in orc-bashing, and have thus bestowed upon us their suspiciously devil-shaped brainchild, Silverfall.

One helping of repetitive strain injury, please

The premise is simple – Bad Things have happened (as is generally the case) to the city of Silverfall, and it’s up to you to put them right. How you will achieve this is unclear, except that it will involve hacking, slashing, and indeed the occasional incineration of anything which threatens to impede your progress. Such attacks are achieved by repeatedly clicking on an enemy until they die or your fingers fall off. Left clicks activate weapon attacks and right clicks perform magic, with quick changes between attack styles and spells available via the number keys.

As with many RPGs, Silverfall provides companions to aid in your pursuit of wanton slaughter and pillaging, and quickly become essential for progression. As you gain experience and level up, so do the world’s other inhabitants, and any battles attempted alone after about an hour of play will quickly result in death, or at least a rapid tactical retreat followed by a quiet spot of wound-nursing. Once you complete the necessary quests to obtain your cohorts however, progress becomes rather easier. While the only direct control you have over your companions is to equip them as you see fit, their behaviour in battle is controlled by issuing commands through dialogue options, and it is a simple matter to create an effective attack squad.

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory

None if this is, you will notice, is particularly new or interesting, and I’ve held off describing what is until now to emphasize this point, because while Silverfall does indeed have some features which are interesting, they don’t work nearly as well as they should. The first and most important of these is the graphics. Monte Cristo decided to use cel-shading, creating a rather pretty world with cartoon styling, particularly emphasised by emboldening every creature with a black outline. While the effect is definitely pleasing to look at, it adds nothing to the game.

Games which use a distinctive graphic style to good effect always have some reason for its existence – a way in which the style links to the gameplay or the world it creates, enhancing the experience. Okami’s brush strokes, conjuring constant images of a Japanese legend. The warm hand-drawn textures of Beyond Good & Evil, creating a beautiful and homely planet which you really want to protect. Or to pick another example of cel-shading, Jet Set Radio Future’s world of graffiti-come-to-life. In Silverfall the graphics are used purely as a selling point, with no underlying philosophy to explain why such a technique should be used.

Another problem is caused by another potentially interesting idea. Rather than the traditional RPG alignments of good and evil, Silverfall provides you with the choice of science versus nature. Supporting one allows you access to new abilities and enhancements as you level up, along with the use of equipment specific to that alignment. Bizarrely however, the actions required in fulfilling an alignment quest are often morally dubious, for example killing a druid so that a protected grove can be mined for resources. Thus the of choice of good or evil is frequently replaced by that of inactivity or evil, and so the mechanism falls apart for anyone trying to follow a path of righteousness, or even what would pass for it in a dim light.

Saving? Why would you want to do that?

There is also a major problem with the saving and loading system. When starting the game you are presented with a picture of your character, equipped as he or she was when you last quit the game, and an option menu including a start button, which is the only time you can load the game. By contrast you can save at any point, but this just retains your state – equipment, experience, skills and quests, and not your position in the world. A subsequent load (by restarting the game) will transport you to the location where you received the latest quest in the main story, regardless of whether you were even in that part of the world. While you can jump instantly to places of importance at any time through the map interface, this relocation is extremely annoying if you were exploring the areas in between, and didn’t realise the consequences of quitting the game.

Strangely, the same thing happens if you die – you are transported back to the main hub, minus all your current equipment. A gravestone then appears where you fell, and returning to it allows for the recovery of the lost items. Thankfully there is an early side quest whose completion grants the opportunity to purchase of life insurance, allowing you to keep all your possessions, and turning death into a mere annoyance of unexplained respawning.

This is indicative of the main problem that Silverfall suffers. It supplements being a painted-by-numbers Diablo clone with some interesting ideas, but they are either not fully thought through or overshadowed by poor implementation and lack of explanations elsewhere. The overall impression is of a game which was created in pieces like a puzzle, and then put together by someone who didn’t quite have the full picture on the front of the box.