Throne of Darkness Updated Preview
We take an extensive look at the upcoming RPG from Click Entertainment.
We were recently invited to Click Entertainment's San Francisco studios to play an advanced build of its upcoming action RPG, Throne of Darkness. Set in a rather dark interpretation of feudal Japan, the game puts you in the role of a party of samurai, who must rid their homeland of evil. A despotic king-turned-dark-warlord, as the story goes, has marshaled a vast army of undead warriors and is rapidly overtaking the countryside. As the honor guard of the land's sole surviving daimyo, it's your job to vanquish the evil force and restore order.
Throne of Darkness is an action RPG in the spirit of Diablo. As such, all movement and combat is accomplished by means of a mouse click--simply click on your destination or target, and your will is enacted. Because the two people in charge of Click Entertainment are ex-Blizzard developers, however, this should come as no surprise. The team wholeheartedly embraces the play mechanics established by Blizzard's classic and has managed to build upon them a tight and playable, if familiar, system. Throne of Darkness' most obvious deviation from the Diablo formula is that it lets you control an entire party of four samurai at one time. While you can directly control only one character at any given moment, toggling between active characters is as simple as hitting the space bar to cycle through your ranks quickly and effectively. Because it's possible to quickly switch between active characters, you'll find that doing so will become an integral part of your strategy--the game's battlefields are fairly large, and the "center" of fights will change often, so you'll usually want to switch to the character nearest to the center.
Your party is composed of seven members, each one specialized in a certain area of combat: There's the brick, who's large and hardy but relatively slow and dim-witted; the mage, who's not as burly as his kin but is the game's most powerful spellcaster; and the leader, who has the highest charisma score, which makes it easy for him to call tactics. There's also a well-rounded swordsman, a mighty berserker, a deft archer, and a deadly ninja.
Calling tactics plays a huge role in the game's battles. Tactics are basically a preset suite of party configurations, which manipulate your samurai's position in battle. There are 12 tactics, and they're all named after animals, which is reflected in the formations they cause your party to take--the snake formation, for example, will cause your party to position itself in a zigzag line, with hardier members hopefully taking the front, while spellcasters and missile users bring up the rear. If a particular tactic's configuration isn't working for you, you can change it--characters' positions are all changeable by means of the tactics editor, so you can tweak (and save) your ideal configuration. Characters' individual combat roles can be altered with the editor as well. You can set everything from their aggressiveness ratings to their primary and secondary weapons and spells. In the end, you have a good amount of control over all members of your party, even when they're fighting via AI. And control is a definite necessity when it comes to Throne of Darkness' thick, nasty battles.
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- GameSpot Score7.1good
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Throne of Darkness Movie 14
Check out some long fights against giant turtle-like creatures.
- Oct 24, 2001
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Images
- Sierra Entertainment
- Click Ent.
- Action Role-Playing
- Release: Sep 24, 2001 »
- ESRB: Mature
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