Evil Islands Preview

Imagine waking up amidst ancient ruins in a strange world, wearing only flimsy garments and possessing nothing more than a crude hunting knife. Even worse, you can't remember who you are or how you got to this strange place. This is the basic premise behind Evil Islands, an impressive hybrid RPG that boasts slick 3D graphics and elements of both action and strategy gaming. The game is the brainchild of Russian developer Nival Interactive, the same company that brought us Rage of Mages. We recently had the opportunity to put the press demo of Evil Islands through its paces, and, for the most part, we liked what we saw.

Click for full size image

As this game begins, your character - an unlikely hero named Zak - wakes up with no memory and very little clothing. The few locals who see him stumble out of the ruins and flee in terror, leaving Zak even more confused. Quickly, you will stumble onto the game's quest-based flow, as the first objective is to follow the frightened folks in the hopes of finding a village or other settlement. After some exploring and a bit of simple combat against wolves and wily boars, Zak finds a village. Unfortunately, the path to the place is guarded by a pack of ogres. Again, you learn another key concept early in the game: It is often better to sneak past an opponent than engage him (or it) in open combat. So Zak crawls past the creatures and enters the village - to a very surprising hero's welcome.

Turns out that the people of this land - called Gipat - have a legend about a strange hero emerging from the ruins. So whether he likes it or not, Zak is now that hero. At this point, the village chief will explain a bit about the village and its situation, begging Zak for help with a few minor tasks. These are the first significant quests in the game and will serve to familiarize players with the controls, the game mechanics, and the experience system (which is fairly nifty). Of course, it also turns out that the chief is not an entirely honest man, nor are most of the other folk in the village, but that will all be explained more fully in the final release of the game. For now, Zak must content himself with a series of quests at the behest of the chief and his archrival, the penny-pinching village craftsmen.

Click for full size image

Graphically, Evil Islands resembles an elaborate mix between Myth II, Populous: The Beginning and Diablo (or more accurately, Nox). You control Zak and as many as two companions with familiar click-on-a-spot-to-move mouse controls. The camera view is fully under your control, and you can rotate, tilt, and zoom in and out at will. You can also "program" a handful of preset camera angles, which can then be called up via hotkeys.

In general, the camera controls in Evil Islands are solid, though things can get tricky when you get into a fight. Here, as in Diablo and its many clones, the mouse performs double duty: Click on a location, and your character will move to it, click on a creature, and your character will attack it. Characters can be controlled individually or in groups. In this version of the game, at least, controlling three different characters separately in real-time is extremely difficult. Your own characters often obscure your view of the bad guys, so it's easy for you to unintentionally click on a character instead of an attack target. As a result, you find yourself ordering one of your guys off to another spot on the map when you were actually trying to swing your obsidian axe at a goblin's head. You can, of course, zoom and rotate the camera quickly to get a better angle, but combat plays out very quickly in Evil Islands, and you may find that no camera movement is fast enough to save one of your characters from an ill-timed maneuver.