The second best dungeon crawler I've played (behind the sequel, of course).
Basic Gameplay Breakdown:
Well, the gameplay is fairly deep for and dungeon crawler / hack - n - slash / whatever you want to call it mostly because off all of the available weapons and armors. You see, the system is like this. You start off with a basic weapon. It could be and axe, a hammer, a sword, a sither, a lot of things, but for now we'll call it "sword". Now, the sword can be characterized by being pretty plain, for example, the name of the weapon would be "sword". However, there are different degrees of "power" for each weapon. You could have all kinds of descriptors for this, such as tainted, charred, cracked, broken, cast iron, polished, enchanted, astral, etc. This already makes a ton of completely different weapons with just one weapon type. This goes for hammers, swords, all of them. I hope that isn't as difficult to understand as it was to explain.
Also, for weapons, you can find rare items on the battlefield with which you can enchant your weapons. You could put a skeleton chip on a sword and the sword would do cold or ice damage. Likewise, if you attached it to a piece of armor, you might get extra resistance to cold or ice. There are enchanting items for everything from health bonuses to mana bonuses, disease damage and poison damage, fire damage and bonuses to dexterity, intelligence, strength, and stamina.
The same thing goes for the armor. There are lots of different descriptors for their varying degrees of power. For example, there might be an armor called "Cast Iron Rathesteel Boots" or something like that.
For weapons and armor, there are also special kinds whose names show up in blue. These weapons / armors may appear weak at first, but they are actually inlaid with special enchantments that might just give you the upper hand in a battle with a bunch of orcs.
As a final note to the different types of weapons and arrmor, there are very rare armors that have special names and whose names show up in yellow. These are often reffered to as "godly" weapons, simply because they make you nearly unstoppable because of the unusually high power for their minimum level requirement. Whoo, that's all for weapons.
Te rest of the gameplay is much simpler and easier to explain. You cast spells with circle and triangle. You slash or attack with X. Very straightforward and simple. Also, the shoulder buttons are to heal health and mana (magic power).
Moving on to the story. The story is actually fairly engrossing. You start off as any of a few races including dark elves, mages, barbarians, rangers, and high elves. These classes all have their own skills. For example, a barbarian may have its primary strength in melee combat while a mage might stay back and fight with magic. Anywho, you start off in a city that is perched on the treetops. Orcs are attacking it, so naturally, you must fight them. You'll never guess how the story ends. Heh heh. Now just have to go pick it up.
Now, I guess I'll stop my mindless ramblings on gameplay and story and get to the meat of it all.
Gameplay: 10/10
Crazily engrossing, very deep, and all around great game in this regard. If you didn't read all of that ^^^ you probably should to get a better idea of the gameplay.
Story: 9/10
The story is very engrossing and exciting at times. Even though it's extremely far fetched even for a fantasy game. And I'm sure that's saying something. Anyway, all around excellent in the story part of things.
Camera: Not really an issue /10
The camera, as you can tell by my rating of it, isn't ever an issue when you're playing. I'm serious, about ten minutes into the game, you'll know exactly how you want the camera at all times. Basically all you can do with the camera is cycle it between three distances from your character and rotate it. Since the camera is constantly over head, this is very easy to work.
ZOMG glitches!!
Yes, I'm sad to say, there are glitches galore in this game. That's why I didn't give it a nine or ten. The game can just suddenly crap out and freeze, it can take away all of the ground so it looks like you're walking on the background, etc. Yes, glitchy, but it isn't all that major, so you'll most likely still have a great time playing this game as long as you aren't a nit picker for glitches. And I mean a TRUE nit picker.
Final Score: 8/10
Yes, to sum it all up, eight out of ten. Great amounts of weapons, armors, and the like. An engrossing story, some nominally likeable characters, the whole shabang, kit 'n caboodle, whatever. The only thing that really sets this game back is it's unhealthy but overall bearable amount of glitches.
All in all, certainly worth a buy for what, about fifteen bucks? Come on. Go pick it up. Or make your parents drive you. You know you wanna......