If you’re a hardcore RPG fan there’s a good chance you’re familiar with Soldak Entertainment. The studio which developed Kivi’s Underworld and Depths of Peril are back again with Din’s Curse. The new game takes a few notes ideas from Blizzard’s hugely popular Diablo series and put their own twist on the standards set by Diablo by adding a faster pacing to the game and an extra level of depth.
First a little story of what Din’s Curse is all about. The character you play is pretty much a jerk. He was never well-liked and was mischievous in life. He’s now dead and Din has taken it on himself to give you a second chance and make amends to the life you squandered. You’re dropped into a middle-of-nowhere town and given the task of becoming a hero and all round nice guy. The town just happens to be sitting on top of a vast multi-level dungeon which is where a large part of the games takes place. Occasionally the evil contained in the dungeon below will spill out onto the town above, and sees you having to race back to town to protect those innocent towns people.
Soon you’re running around your new stomping grounds and talking to the people of the town opening up new quests and tasks to carry out. These quests are often time sensitive so you’ll often find yourself fighting against the clock rather than the nasties in the dungeon. Failing a quest can hurt your reputation, as will failing to protect the town and getting someone killed if you don’t make it in time to thwart an attack.
Things never really feel stale in Din’s Curse either as one of the games features is procedurally generating a lot of the content. Everything from the NPCs to the quests and even the dungeons are randomized and it really does help to keep the game feeling fresh and unpredictable. As soon as you’re knee deep in slashing your way through the dungeons, Din’s Curse will feel very familiar to anyone who has played any recent Action-RPG.
The game has your standard choices of archetypes you’d expect such as the thief, warrior, mage, each with three skill sets or a unique class called Hybrid, which allows you to choose two skill sets, and pick them from any other class. This does restrict your choices, but allows you to cherry pick healing along with brute force.
As I touched on before, each class gets three skills sets, and each of these have different types of armor and weapons that you can equip, as well as unique properties like increased mana, and both active and passive skills that you can level up if you have the right amount of skill points. Din’s Curse also manages to pack in multiplayer. This allows players to play cooperatively on a server hosted by one of the players. This plays out in a very similar way to the single player side of things with quests and experience being shared among the players.
There are a few negatives with Din’s Curse though. The graphics and animations are sometimes a little rough around the edges, but the music in the game is well done. The music seems cued by various events in the world and swells when your deep in battle and dissipates as your exploring new areas. With that in mind Din’s Curse is still a pleasure to play and offers enough new mechanics to help differentiate it from a genre which could easily become very bland.
[review pros="Highly addictive gameplay" cons="Rough graphics and animations" verdict="A little gem of hack ‘n slash RPG" score=80]
