List Price: £23.47
Our Price: £5.49
Availability: N/A
Manufacturer: Monte Cristo
Average Customer Rating:
Manufacturer Maximum Age: 18 Binding: Video Game Brand: Monte Cristo EAN: 3760007414817 ESRB Age Rating: Everyone Label: Monte Cristo Manufacturer: Monte Cristo Manufacturer Minimum Age: 132 Platform: Windows XP Publisher: Monte Cristo Release Date: 2007-03-09 Studio: Monte Cristo
Customer Rating: Summary: I like it Comment: Ok, So I'm not a big fan of the point and click and the camera can be annoying at times, but only when you're trying to click something far off- it's never an issue in combat.
I'd say I have an average system, nothing special, and I play the game without any issues.
As to complaints of dying a lot, not if you're careful, and also of course how you allocate stat/skill points and your class makes a huge difference.
I have been playing too much in a short period of time, up to level 52 now and I've died about 5 times at most, insurance is cheap (last price for me was less than 500 gold, I have over 65k), no idea what the cap is, and I do get bored as you'd expect, but i still keep coming back, and I'll get Earthfall too when I finish this.
In short it's not amazing but it is fun, and its worth a look especially when it's as cheap as it is now Customer Rating: Summary: Silverfall Comment: It's clear that the creaters of Silverfall had the best of intentions. They have combined much of the tried and tested gameplay from classics such as Diablo and Dungeon Siege with a twist of their own fresh ideas, adding concepts such as nature vs technology and pro active death insurance to try and make this game their own.
I'm going to try and focus on the positive sides of this game at first; graphically it is not so bad, the characters appear as though out of a cartoon comic strip, and though not to everyone's taste, I found the models used to be quite fun! This goes for all the models, from the characters themselves, be it a cheeky goblin, or a hulking troll, to the weapons and armour, offering truely murderous looking crossbows through to a porcupine fish-on-a-stick.
Well that's the positive bit done, now down to the negative aspects of this game. For ease of reading, I'm going to have to break this down into sections.
Installation: OMG this takes an age and a half to install, and then, when you think it is finally over, you find out that the installation failed. I have a few PC's in my home, myself and my gf often play co-op network games together, which is the reason we purchased (two copies of) Silverfall in the first place. We have two identical PC's but funnily enough, after installing Silverfall I had different problems on each of them, neither of which would run the game. It was after some significant amount of troubleshooting, reinstalling, patching and file manipulation that I could get the game to run on both PCs. Fortunately for me, the bugs and errors others have had getting Silverfall to run are extensively documented and available online, so I had resources enough available to get the problem fixed.
Character selection: Other reviews have criticised that the character creation of Silverfall is limited, this is not true. I found that there are many different variations and combinations available, however during the character creation purpose, there seems to be no, or at least very little, relational structure between slider bars. This means that a troll missing an eye with silder bar A set to a certain position, will look completely different if you change silder bar C, this leads to frustration from the very start to those who like to have their character looking "just right".
The Interface: The UI used is inflexible, but I have played on worse, they tried hard with frilly borders etc, but I for one would have liked the freedom to move the various boxes around screen to match my clicking and cut down on mouse distance travelled. The Mini-map, the colour coded blips that represent NPCs, and the directional compass are all sub par, and make navigation difficult. NPCs such as vendors, quest givers and utilities a pain to find, and make it all to easy for you to accidently wander into a large group of hostiles.
Gameplay: The best that can be said for the gameplay is that it is simple and works (to a degree). It's pretty standard for a "left click to move and small attack, right click for a power attack" type setup, but for some reason Silverfall just isn't fluid. When you try to run away you can't help but select new hostiles who have a grossly oversized "click to select" box, making it impossible to escape. Things only get more complicated once you have picked up a companion, where after every second click seems to open a dialogue instead of move, this is symptomatic of the companion always being about one footstep behind your character.
Character progression: there are two sides to character progression to note. Firstly the skill trees, which despite being badly explained and confusing as to which skills are a right click attack and which are a left click attack, I quite liked to start off with. However, when reaching about the middle of the game I discovered the min max sytem behind it, and my character suddenly became almost invincible. I actually had to stop using a certain skill to give the monsters I was fighting a fair chance. At least Silverfall offers a method to recover skill points spent so you can respec yourself if you feel you made a mistake. It's an expensive process, but there is heck all else to do with the money you get (except for one payment needed to progress a quest) and paying for death insurance, which becomes moot once you have a few skills anyway.
Secondly, there is the case of armour and equipment progression. Now I will say that Silverthorne has some great looking gear, I especially liked the backpack line, where you can sport banners and other stat boosting trophies for that extra bit of individuality. My gripe with the equipment system is that there seems to be no rhyme nor reason as to what will constitute an upgrade. This means that you need to check every single piece of gear that drops just in case it might be an upgrade, and so much stuff drops that you spend more time picking up junk than you do actually killing the critters who drop it. At least raising gold never becomes an issue because of this, not that you have anything to spend the gold on.
The plot: To me, the definition of a good rpg is one with a good storyline that you can really get yourself immersed into. RPGs and lore go hand in hand, and always have since the good old days of pen and pencil D&D, I just wish someone had told the makers of Silverfall! The plot they came out with has the feeling of one of those stories teenagers write at sleepovers, where they write a few lines each, fold the paper over and hand it to the next person to write the next few lines. It's disjointed and inconsistant, not just in the lore, where some trolls are classic "thick as pig dung" trolls, and others are haughty nobles, but the main quest NPC seems to jump from a "he" to a "she" throughout the duration of the game. You would have thought the game designers might have realised different actors played the voiceovers for the same character part, but apparently not.
In conclusion, my experience of Silverfall is: 1 and a half days installation frustration, 10 minutes of being impressed, 2 hours of frustration, and about a day of just wanting it to be over.
After completing this game I am happy to say I have removed it from my PC completely and will never be reinstalling it. Customer Rating: Summary: Competent Diablo 2 clone Comment: First of all, I'm giving this 4 stars but only because I can't give it 3.5 stars. Using percentages I'd rate it a 70-75% action RPG.
Secondly, when I bought it it was under seven quid and at any price under a tenner I'd recommend it to an ation RPG junkie but at full price? Not so much.
It ran great on my system (C2D E4750, 2GB, 8800GT) and I love the cel-shaded graphics. In fact the whole art direction is some of the best I've seen in a game of this type and you really get to appreciate it in a flyby of all the zones later in the game. Controls are simple and pretty intuitive, although default binding health and mana to 9 and 0 isn't the best idea.
Finding your way about the map can be tricky. Overall the map is pretty bad and you have to watch out like crazy for the mere hints of suggestions of a path that'll take you to the next zone. Miss a slightly snowier path or a darker piece of rock, suggesting a bridge, and you'll be left wandering around for ages.
You know the routine, start with nothing but a rusty spoon and kill increasingly harder enemies who drop phat loot until you're a whirling dervish of destruction. It's a quickish runthrough first time, probably around the 25-30 hour mark on normal if you do most of the side-quests.
It's hard at the start but honestly not that hard. If you're getting beaten - RUN AWAY. The real problem is balancing. I played a pure warrior (with a little healing at the start) and while I died 4 or 5 times in quick succession at the very start, once I had it sussed I didn't die again until I beat the end-boss with 5 or 6 double-whacks of my twin swords. And then it was over, but with the option to run through again at higher levels. But once you beat the game on normal there's virtually no point trying to play on difficult because it'll be too easy, you need to go to very difficult to challenge your character in the starter zones. Except by then you've seen all the zones (which aren't randomized like D2) and done all the quests.
There's a nature vs technology sub-plot running through the game but it's just fluff, in my opinion, and made no real difference to me except for the armour I got to wear or the weapons I could use. There are spells available and you could opt to play as a nature druid or technology engineer type character but I didn't really explore that end of things. The nature vs technology sub-plots have zero bearing on the main quests.
So if my rating is a little high the tone of the review may seem a little low but I actually really enjoyed myself but just not enough to want to run through it again, hence my suggestion that you buy this a cheap as possible and certainly not at full price.
Customer Rating: Summary: The Biggest Hog Comment: This game looked and sounded pretty good so I went out and bought it. When it took two ice ages to get to the main screen I knew I was going to be disappointed....
Don't get me wrong, Silverfall is a good game, nice graphics, good old Diablo like hack n slash game play, and an interesting science vs. nature plot premise.
But...and its a big BUT..this game has to be the worst system hog I've ever come across!
I have a top end PC and a stonking graphics card but even on medium settings the game runs like a one legged badger! The pathetic frame rates and constant stuttering are infuriating, especially considering this is a fast paced game!
Trust me when I say you will suffer for it. At some points things run smoothly, but as soon as you heave a sigh of relief and begin to enjoy what is a stunning fantasy world, it turns into a stuttering nightmare that makes you think you've entered a Matrix movie!
Unfortunately, this problem really saps the life out what is actually an above average RPG.
If you have a machine the size of a closet, then go ahead and enjoy! If not...avoid Silverfall and go back to playing Diablo!
Customer Rating: Summary: gets better Comment: I agree with "Gray the elfs" review being very hard to get going in this game, I did die a lot at the beginning. It did get really annoying and I really did think about giving up, it wasnt much fun at all, but, after persevering it does get better and more fun. Once you have a companion and pets life is much easier.
I also agree with Gray on the point and click movement, I dont like this at all, its really annoying when your companions get in your way when you want to move and you end up with a dialog box because you have accidently clicked on them.
the Camera angle isnt movable enough either, you can either zoom right in and have a good far view ahead or zoom out and look down on your char but not be able to see very far ahead, I really want to be able to tilt the camera angle to suit me.
Overall this is quite enjoyable but nothing special.
