Topic: Neverend & Mage Knight: Apocalypse Reviews from GameSpot -- vicious reviews!

[MysterD]

GameSpot's vicious review on Neverend....these are always entertaining....3.3 from G-Spot

Thankfully, this RPG only feels like it never ends.

The Good: Once you get past the suffering, you'll have a lot of laughs (at the game's expense).

The Bad: Visuals straight out of a late-'90s golf game; unbalanced monster encounters; dated, ineffective turn-based combat engine; ludicrous dialogue and voice acting.

Ouch.....

If you're a fan of role-playing games and point-and-click adventures, NeverEnd will offend you on just about every possible level. This cross-genre effort from Bratislava's Mayhem Studios is so far behind the times that it's about as modern as the telegram, with graphics straight out of a decade-old golf game and gameplay clunky enough to evoke fond memories of the Commodore 64. Unless you're looking for some laughs or a trip down memory lane, stay far, far away from this one.

LOL @ Commodore 64.

That said, at least the setup is sort of intriguing. Instead of playing the usual unsung hero or stuffed shirt in chain mail, here you take the role of Agavaen, a female thief. Her band of merry men kicks off the game by holding a drunken party in the woods to celebrate the heist of a chest full of gold pieces. Unfortunately, by the time she wakes up with a killer hangover the next morning, a couple of her pals have scrammed with the booty, and the boss of the outfit blames her for leading them all astray with her feminine wiles. But rather than take any guff about her love of crop tops, Agavaen kills him and sets off on a quest to recover the cash.

At least the premise does sound interesting....playing a female rogue thief and all.

A capable designer could have had a lot of fun with such an antihero premise. Mayhem Studios, however, somehow couldn't construct a viable game around Agavaen, the hot-chick thief. Although the developer does a reasonable job of walking the line between the RPG and adventure genres by adding role-playing stats, level progression, and although the game is turn-based, a hack-and-slash Diablo vibe to point-and-click adventuring, the game mechanics are abysmal. Once you get beyond the bones of the admittedly beefy feature set, the game falls apart.

Why didn't they go for real-time combat w/ the option to pause a la most modern Bioware games (NWN, BG series)?

Balance is a huge problem. In terms of difficulty, the encounters in NeverEnd are all over the place. Right from the beginning of the game, you might run into monsters that are powerful enough to slaughter you in seconds. This continues to occur throughout the game. You'll be moving along just fine, then suddenly, you run into a pair of ghosts you can't even scratch, or a couple of faeries (yes, faeries) who smoke you in seconds with critical hits.

This sounds worse than the rediculous-ness of over-powerful enemies in Gothic 2, if you take one wrong turn in the game.

The game is pretty heavy on combat, as well, and there is no way to avoid going mano a mano on a frequent basis, as battles appear totally out of the blue when you're exploring the wilderness. One moment you're wandering through an empty clearing, then the next moment, you see a "Prepare for Battle" warning and are off to yet another melee with who knows what kinds of enemies.

Sounds very old-school Final Fantasy-esque.

Given all that, it probably shouldn't surprise you that the combat engine itself is also poorly designed. Battles use a turn-based system that feels and functions much like what was used once upon a time in RPGs--as in the classic AD&D Gold Box games from the late 1980s and early 1990s. When battle begins, you immediately shift to a third-person arena where you select a combat action (typically fighting with a melee weapon or casting a spell), pick an attack type or spell, and then watch as you shuffle forward and take a swing at the targeted opponent.

The entire process works reasonably well, but it seems like a glimpse into the distant past. Combat is slow, clunky, lacking in tension, and hampered by some extremely choppy character animations. However, many of the battle arenas look good before anyone starts moving, and some battles even take place in gorgeous tree-covered clearings that are spotted with sunlight and shadow.

Okay.

Still, there are just a handful of these arenas, so you're fighting in the same locations all the time, and many don't match the setting that you're exploring on the map. You may be wandering through a swamp, but as soon as a fight begins, you're often magically transported to a shady glade that is complete with a bower in the background--as if you just interrupted somebody's backyard wedding.

What the hell....!!?

Other presentation values are also many years out of date. Outdoor vistas look a lot like something you would have seen in a golf game seven or eight years ago, with jagged 3D characters and objects on top of backdrop photographs of cloudy skies, forested hills, and trees. At times it's hard to tell if you're in a fantasy game or are about to tackle the back nine at Sawgrass. There are no frills here, either. Pick up a non-player character to tag along in your adventures, and you only see him or her when you're engaged in combat. At all other times when you're exploring the map, you just get an icon in the top right of the screen to remind you of your buddy's presence.

Audio belongs in a museum as well. Not to belabor the golf-game comparisons, but outdoor sound effects include bird chirping and animal trilling, exactly like you heard when playing Links LS 98. The soundtrack loops the same annoying synthesizer tune over and over again every couple of minutes.

LOL @ an RPG sounds like a Golf game...

Voice acting is so bad that you'd swear the actors are making fun of the script. Most of the lines sound like they were voiced by drama-class teenagers who were forced to stay after school and record this drivel for extra credit. All of the dialogue sounds crazily rushed, so subdued that you want to reach into the screen and check the speaker for a pulse or so overacted that it's impossible to believe that the actors are taking any of it seriously.

LOL!

You won't be able to take NeverEnd seriously either. While you might ultimately find some unintentional humor with this game, there are too many great RPGs and adventure games out there for you to waste your time laughing at how lousy this one is.

Ow.

[MysterD]

4.4 for Mage Knight: Apocalypse from GameSpot, another vicious review

The game takes you through six chapters. In each chapter you'll work your way from the beginning of a dungeon to the end, killing hundreds of monsters along the way. The dungeons are all very linear, and it's easy to find your way through. The same can't be said for your computer-controlled allies, though. In each chapter you'll get a new hero to join your party, and you can issue basic commands like follow and attack. However, the artificial intelligence is so terrible that you'll hardly ever see your fellow heroes. More often than not they'll get stuck behind a wall or won't be able to figure out how to turn a corner to follow you, so they'll just stand there leaving you to deal with half a dozen or more monsters at a time.

If the game is going to have bad AI for a party-based RPG game, why even make the game party-based???

Because of your unhelpful companions as well as the high volume of enemies in the game, you'll die a lot. When you die you simply resurrect at the nearest save point. Since the save points are all over the place, you'll usually only have to take a few steps to pick up the fight right where you left off. You'll quickly fall into a very repetitive and annoying cycle of death where you resurrect, fight, and die over and over again. You'll slowly pick away at the mob of monsters until finally they're all dead, then you can move on to do it all again. It removes any sort of challenge or sense of attrition from the game, since the only penalty for dying is coming back to life a few steps away with half of your mana and life back. When you have a sliver of health left why bother wasting a potion or a healing spell when you can just die and regain half your life? Not only does it make absolutely no sense, it just isn't fun.

That sounds crummy and repetitive.

Mage Knight Apocalypse is a poorly executed take on a tried-and-true formula. The game has everything you'd expect from an action RPG, but none of it is handled well. The multiplayer is a hassle, the single-player is riddled with bugs and frustrating design flaws, and the presentation is sloppy. If you can somehow overlook all of these flaws, you could spend a lot of time going through all six chapters of the game with each of the five characters. But when you consider how many similar games of better quality are already available, you're left with very little reason to play this one

It seems like this year, we've got a lot of high-quality RPG's -- Oblivion + all its DLC content, upcoming NWN2, GW: Factions, upcoming Guild Wars: Nightfall, the upcoming WoW: Burning Crusade Expansion, DS: Broken World expansion, upcoming Dark Messiah of M & M, and of course the upcoming Gothic 3.

And, unlike the past few years, this year we got a handful of some very poor quality ones, too -- such as Night Watch, NeverEnd, and it sounds like you can add Mage Knight: Apocalypse, too. Last few years, we ain't had many RPG's -- but what we had, been at least worth while....

[Xessive]

Hehe it's kind of a neat coincidence that you just added this part about Mage Knight! I just played it!

Honestly the one good point in the game is that it has very sexy female characters. The graphics are not bad, and they would have complemented the game very well, if the gameplay was good, and if it wasn't so buggy. The controls are frustratingly clunky, and anything but smooth. It's the same control scheme as Diablo 2, but if you hold the mouse button down your character literally stalls and jitters until he/she gets to the point you let go of the button. With all that you still have to deal with a retarted font for the inventory and shops. It's not anti-aliased and it's ridiculously stylized, like it would have been a good font for a header or a title, but you'd never use it for lists so it can be hard to read.

The game is repetitive and generally boring.. The only way I'll bother with it is if I can get a trainer so I can breeze through it and see if there is a story worth going through all the trouble.

Namco should stick to action games. When I saw the screenshots I had no idea it was an Action-RPG. All the shots are close-ups showing off the action and moves, and with the "Namco" label I naturally assumed it was a "beat 'em up" game. It's kinda ironic considering someone made Demon Stone (based in the Forgotten Realms universe) and most people assumed it was gonna be a RPG, but it turned out to be a beat 'em up action game.

[Quemaqua]

Huh.  It looked like it had promise, and the screens looked pretty.  Why'd they give it a 6 for graphics?  It looks better than that, unless it animates horribly.

[MysterD]

Huh.  It looked like it had promise, and the screens looked pretty.  Why'd they give it a 6 for graphics?  It looks better than that, unless it animates horribly.

I dunno', but I wonder how well the game runs, technically.

I bet the major clipping issues hurt the game the most.

There are also graphical glitches that make the game look much worse than it should. Characters clip through one another and through walls and objects in the environment, and there are some minor graphical bugs that frequently appear. On several occasions one of our companions died, and then remained a corpse even after being revived. The clipping isn't just ugly, it affects the gameplay as well. Enemy archers will shoot you through walls, pillars, and stone, and if you try to retaliate you'll get a message that your attack failed because you didn't have a line of sight.

[Quemaqua]

Clipping isn't really a graphics problem, though.  It's a programming problem.

[Xessive]

Yeah, it's full of bugs.. And if you have a joypad attached to your system then the cam will be out of control. Simple workaround: unplug the pad and restart the game. As for everything else, yeah the bugs are pretty bad.

The graphics look fine, but they animate terribly. It "jitters" and jumps a lot. Kinda like how a CD in a car skips.

[Xessive]

I just played some more of Mage Knight, and I realized the most accurate way to describe it! It feels like a MMORPG Beta with some serious lag! Most things seem to happen with a delay, crappy interface, and a jam pack of bugs.

I also noticed that the compass doesn't rotate with the mini-map if it's set to rotate, so it's useless unless your mini-map is static.

It's a real shame, so much effort in the art and sound departments gone down the drain.