When you begin a new game, you create a character from a standard lineup of fantasy races--human, elf, goblin, or troll--before proceeding to customize characteristics such as hair color and type, facial structure, and skin color. You are then shown a brief cinematic of the beautiful city of Silverfall. As you watch, a portal is hijacked by unseen and unknown evil forces that send waves of zombies to attack the fair city. Instead of facing the monsters with your avatar, you are given control of city's Archmage, who has access to high level spells which you can use to push back the tide of zombies. This stage serves as the game's tutorial, and aside from overly verbose explanations of mechanics such as movement and combat controls, I found it a good deal of fun to play around with some of the game's magic spells; it served as a way to look into what magic I might be interested in using in the future.
Silverfall's primary selling point is supposed to be the different ways that aligning with nature or technology can affect the course of the storyline and gameplay. Unfortunately, the implementation falls far short of its intended goals. In terms of storyline, I did not notice any significant changes. NPCs will sometimes reveal their allegiance as you converse with them and will give you quests specifically geared toward one path or the other. Oddly, I was able to accept technology driven quests with my nature-based character, even though the NPC who was trying to give me the quest started out by saying that he hated "tree-huggers." Why talk to me, then? Though this is not as prevalent as the game progresses, it is still jarring to realize that the choice between nature and technology is often inconsistent.
Many of the skills have identical counterparts. Nature's Help summons a minion to your aid, as does technology's Mechanical Slave. Nature lovers can use Swarm to sic a flock of insects on a group of enemies, and techies can do roughly the same thing with Radiation. Other than a slight variation in spell types, there is nothing to significantly sway players toward one allegiance or the other. Technology allows characters to make use of guns later on in the game, but given that magic spells become powerful in a relatively short amount of time, guns seem antiquated and unnecessary. Why shoot an enemy in the head when you can freeze an entire mob and pummel it with meteors?
Silverfall might have been more interesting if the two sides had ended up being different enough to warrant multiple playthroughs, but the story is difficult to experience during one playthrough, let alone a second. Though a good deal of voice acting is used, Silverfall makes prolific use of text boxes to relay the game's storyline to the player. Unfortunately, the text itself is badly broken. The level of writing itself seems extremely elementary at its best. Perhaps this is due to translation issues--Monte Cristo's studio is comprised primarily of French speaking developers--but whatever the cause, it severely cripples the game. Some dialogue is laughably cliché ("Kernion! I was waiting for you! What do you think of my little invasion?") while some seems to lose all track of continuity. The very first scene depicts your character leading a group of survivors out of the city while the Archmage stays behind to fight the zombies. And yet, after my time with the Archmage came to end an, a text box popped up saying, "While the Archmage was bravely fighting, some survivors guided by Archmage and Kara..." How had I, as the Archmage, lead a group of survivors to safety somewhere outside of the city when I was still in the city? I know I was in Silverfall because I was the one running around throwing fireballs.
Grammatical, punctuation, and other errors abound, making reading quite a chore. There are times when two characters' dialogue quotes are meshed together ("What? What evil spell? Nooo! You thought you'd defeat me so easily? But here I am, more powerful than ever..."). Sometimes sentences will close with proper punctuation, but start the next line without a space to delineate separate lines. In some cases, punctuation is omitted entirely. Text will occasionally be cut off, causing confusion with mission objectives and gameplay instructions. During the tutorial, a text box appeared that read: "In the options you can deactivate the camera rotation by placing the cursor at the edge of the"--the what? The screen? I went into the Options tab to investigate, but all I actually had to do was check or uncheck a camera rotation box. The instruction was not only cut off, but did not lead anywhere to begin with.
Combat in Silverfall is simple and uninspiring. Left click launches physical or weapon-based ranged attacks, and right click casts magic. Instead of using character classes, Silverfall allows players to construct their characters by allocating skill points among combat, magic, or other, which consist of race-specific skills, as well as nature and technology trees. Melee combat can be fun, though magic is unbalanced to the point that not using it makes the game unnecessarily difficult. The difficulty curve starts out rather steep for all character types in the beginning; I wandered outside the camp and picked off a few level 1 zombies only to be accosted by level 4 and 5 undead just a short distance away. Instead of evening itself out, the rapid rate of magic upgrading soon causes the game to become too easy, obliterating the challenge as soon as you boost a few skills to level 2 or 3.
Everything else about the gameplay feels cut and pasted in. Questing offers typical action RPG fare: kill a certain number of creatures and return for a reward, kill a certain boss monster so the local town will be safe, retrieve a certain item from a certain spot. You find loot with which to adorn your character, selling all the rest in the hopes of getting some health potions or perhaps items that will better allow you to find unique gear. It feels redundant, and that is because it is. There is some saving grace in multiplayer, which includes a cooperative mode. Even that gets old quickly, because due to the overbalancing of the game's magic, your group will probably end up using the same spells anyway. In short, the gameplay offers nothing new: I've thrown fireballs before; I've called down meteors, I've used rings of ice to hold enemies in place; I've summoned pets that have no discernible characteristics.
Graphically, Silverfall offers a comic book-like art style that is unique to this genre. Characters and enemies are outlined in black to make them easily distinguishable, and items dropped by enemies emit puffs of smoke, which at first led me to believe that everything falling onto the ground was on fire. Environments and spells effects are attractive, but my system (AMD Turion-64 2GHz; 2GB RAM; 256MB ATI Radeon X1600) stuttered when lots of enemies and particles were being rendered.
Silverfall's problems are less that it is explicitly bad, and more that it is simply mundane and repetitive. There is nothing new to do here, no new challenges for veterans of the genre to undertake. The story does not become any less difficult to decipher, nor does it have anything interesting to offer during the few times it is comprehensible. It is true that games in this genre do not need strong storylines to be successful, but because the gameplay does not provide a strong front line presence, there is little to get excited about. I played for chunks of an hour or two at a time, killing monsters and finding gear for my avatar, casting spells and enjoying the graphic novel-ish graphics, but I realized early on that I was only playing this game because I had to. The game is proof that a pretty face is not enough to succeed in the long run, which will render Silverfall a forgotten game in a long line of nondescripts.
Monte Cristo Multimedia's Silverfall was released in North America today by Atari.
