To rub salt into the wound, the items and equipment rewards for quest completion are often obsolete by the time you get them anyway, surpassed by pieces found in the field. There are plenty of side quests to tackle at your own pace outside of the lengthy storyline, but killing 'X number of Y to gather their Zs' is still just as familiar when you're chasing chicken-lizards as orcs. Quest types are split broadly into the two classic categories of kill and fetch, often artificially extended by forcing you to traipse back to the quest-giver in between the quick jaunts to pick up items from the local area rather than giving you a long list and letting you get on with it. Playful environments and enemies can only do so much to distract from the single mechanic on offer. DeathSpank is clearly designed to be a fairly lightweight approach to hackandslash, fit for short bursts rather than long sessions, but a lack of depth to levelling, armour or weapon customisation makes a grind out of much of the action. Like nearly any game in the genre, repetition is the key gripe. Should they do so, a handy hint system is in place, fuelled by the fortune cookies found lying around the landscape. There are a couple of moments that force the player to use their brain, but they fall so few and far between that your thinking muscles are likely to have atrophied. Even the website says, "Mind numbing yet completely fair adventure game puzzles!" but in truth these amount to the odd combination of inventory items or the picking of the right conversation tree. It's not really Diablo crossed with anything, really, just Diablo lite. There are also very few puzzles in the game. While it's possible to carefully plan an attack, using blocking and inventory items to nuance your approach in response to your foes, the constant nature of the hacking and the effectiveness of straight-up attack spamming means any impetus to do so quickly fades. There's a distinct lack of penalty to death, the cash dropped on extinction easily gathered up once you respawn at one of the nearby 'outhouses', or by dropping extraneous kit into the handy 'item grinder' which turns anything into gold - neatly sidestepping the need to schlep back and forth between shops when your inventory fills up. Using several different weapons one after the other will also build a combo counter, maxing out at seven with a powerful knockback attack, but it's a difficult thing to pull off, and not rewarding enough when you do. The attacks themselves are useful, and picking up rare runes allows the player to combine two in-hand weapons in a single devastating justice attack - a spinning-fire-slash of flamey-doom, for example.īlocking is another seemingly underused mechanic, made difficult by the lack of obvious animation tells in many enemies' attacks. The gauge charges quickly enough for this to be only a minor annoyance, but it would have been nice to see an extra button combo requirement to use its powers.
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