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Role-playing Game of the Year
Publisher: Interplay Developer: Black Isle Studios Review "It's clearly the best traditional computer role-playing game of the year and is bound to be an all-time favorite for many of its inevitable fans." - Greg Kasavin, GameSpot Review
Few gamers were familiar with the Planescape license, and on first inspection, Torment looked very different from any previous AD&D-licensed game. However, underneath that very deliberate skin of dirty environments and seedy slums was an RPG of outstanding quality. Planescape: Torment is a better game than last year's winner, Baldur's Gate, for it addresses the deficiencies of Baldur's Gate by adding many gameplay elements from Fallout, our winner in 1997. Thus, in Torment, your actions and dialogue options are informed by your character's statistics: High dexterity lets you snap the necks of guards before they can call for help, and high intelligence lets you lie and bluff your way out of predicaments. The graphics for the spells are eye-catching, and the voice acting and sounds are high quality. Even the monotony of the early environments is mitigated by later environments that have surprising color and personality. But what makes Torment our RPG of the year is its well-written story of an immortal trying to die. We don't want to ruin the plot for you, but there are many areas, clues, and characters you meet that shed light on your situation and provide great reading throughout the game. Indeed, if this game has a fault, it would be that its gameplay consists mainly of reading. Although a show-not-tell approach would have been even better, especially for conveying the true flavor of the myriad planes and interesting situations, the quality of the story is so good that you'll want to keep playing and reading. Torment is that good. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
