Wastelanders Review

I know I haven’t written a review in awhile, mainly because I been too preoccupied with work, video games, work, video games, comics, video games. I kinda, also took an unannounced hiatus and just reblogged and posted a bunch of pictures.

The question is though, what made me write up a review for a game?
Oh buddy, have I found a game to talk about today.
Normally, when reviewing a game, I like to talk about the plot, story/setting, the positive, and the negative aspects of the game, give it the full roundabout.
I have finally found a game that takes the cake, a game I just can’t stand to play.

Dungeon Lords



To talk about this game, let me explain how I stumbled across dear-old Dungeon Lords. I was with my other half in one of my favorite re-sale shop, Half Priced Books. While I was stumbling through the PC games, looking for something to tie a weekend up, I found this. Upon closer inspection of the flip cover, I  was able to get a understanding and read things such as this -



“Wow, those are some pretty impressive looking reviews. Seven races and five classes to pick from? This does look great.”

What I did not do was COMPLETELY read those statements. There are preview statements before the game was released and before the final product was judged.
Everything I thought about the game is wrong, and I have never been so wrong in my life before.

The overall story is that a king is dead, his daughter is missing, the Circle of Mages is in terror and it’s your job to help fix everything, and the missing daughter holds the answers to all the problems.
The games starts off with you on a dark, lonesome road in what seems to be the middle of the night. You are greeted by a postman that says he has a letter for you, a invitation from the seers of a nearby town, and that you are to follow there immediately. Turning around, and following the road you are ambushed by a few bandits. Once they are dealt with with, just a few steps away is the town, but it appears o to be shut of as no one is allowed to enter or leave because the kings daughter is missing. As you turn around and begin to walk away with your tail between your legs (quite literally is your race is a lizard-man or werewolf) a lone goblin tells you he knows were the princess is located and leads you to an area around the castle, in front of the sewer entrance, were you are again ambushed, by goblins.

The control is of your basic computer action-adventure, RPG. WASD to move and the mouse to look around. To attack, you must look it the direction of your enemy and left-click to swing your main weapon. These are the only controls that make sense throughout the rest of the game. My first problem occurred when I tried to open my inventory. There is nothing on the HUD except for your health/exp/name card, so I figured it must all be done with hot keys. So I press “I” to open up my inventory, nothing happens. I try to key a few more times and nothing works. I start pressing around on the keyboard and soon find out that it’s “E” for equipment. I know that a select few other RPG’s do use “E” for equipment, but It seems so out of place in this game. There is also no mouse control in the main portion of the game, as it’s mainly used for looking around, you only use the mouse in menus. while this is a common thing, mainly in action games for the PC, it does not fit into Dungeon Lords.

The game play is were the game gets really “good”. I soon find out after my first little battle with the bandits that I can’t click on something to pick it up, as I stated in my previous paragraph. I again tried every button on the keyboard and I almost gave up until my pinky accidentally hit the shift button and the game told me that my character was finally able to pick up the shinny stack of gold laying in front of him. I have played games that use weird keys to pick up items, even some old DOS games that us the F1 - 12 keys to interact with object, but to be honest, I have never used shift to pick up items.
Your now thinking, “But Zack, why not change the key-bindings?”
Well, that’s because you CAN’T CHANGE THEM DURING GAME PLAY. I have never played a game that would not allow me to change the key functions during the game, why would you not add this?

It only goes downhill from here. Once I figured out how to pick up items, and I slayed the goblins behind the town gate, I started to pick up there gear. One goblin have a sword, a “goblin sword”. I saw another one and tried to pick it up, as I did, a message on the bottom of the HUD said “Goblin sword discarded”. Confused, I checked my inventory and saw that I still had my goblin sword in my inventory. Now even more confused, I walked around picking up a couple of other swords, and was getting the same message. It was not until I thumbed through the manual again and came to the conclusion, you can only have ONE OF THE SAME ITEM. That’s for everything that’s not a consumable like potions or arrows.

“Oh, you wanna sell that extra gear for gold? To bad.”

“Wanna duel-wield the same weapon in the other hand? Can’t do that.”

Continuing on the downhill slope, the game has four starting classes. Fighter, Adept (Cleric), Mage, & Thief. Once you pick your class you can then pick your weapon skills from the list available to that class. Now the problem here, and what it does not tell you, if that you can pick skills for weapons and magic that are not yet available to your class. I picked a fighter, and saw there was skills for polearms and heavy armor, which happen to be two things I love in RPG’s. Once I began the game and checked my states I saw that I have a negative four in weapon damage and a negative 2 in armor. At this point I realized that the game will not give you the basics, my character could NOT use a short sword. The most basic weapon in all of RPG’s, and my character could not use it.

I’m going to talk about the graphic and the positive aspects of the game at one time, because the graphics are the only decently good thing from this game. For 2004, the game is extremely pretty, especially for a dungeon crawler and found them pleasant to look at. I also must give phrase to the amount of races and classes the game offer. Seven races and thirty-three classes is a pretty hefty amount, even if they only allow you to pick from four in the beginning.

I have a small list of unplayable games. Until now, it only consisted of Run Like Hell and Cold Fear. As of today though, I can (sadly) say that Dungeon Lords in now on that list.

I been putting a lot of time and hours into New Leaf, but I have not visited anyone else’s town. 
So if you wanna chat, hang out, fish, or just play around my friend code is:
2380-3234-0359
Send me a message on here or go ahead and add me~!

lemonfont:

protomlad:

thebrownhatter:

shivi-vivi:

rare?

RARE!?

RRRARE NEW GAME??????

“We’re proud to announce our long awaited sequel…”