Diablo wannabe? Yes! Well, now you can read on, though you may have an idea of what we are talking about. Everything is pretty basic here, and all in all it doesn't make for a bad gaming experience. Absolutely no multi-player, decent sprites graphic, plain sounds and no music and pretty enjoyable although hard at the beginning gameplay. This is 'The Broken Land'. At the beginning you choose amongst four characters, being all pretty ugly. Well, everything you may think of in such a game is there, manna/magic, huge inventory, healing potions, swords, bows, huge looking monsters. Dear guys at A.P.F. with this game you are only 4/5 years late, anyway still an acceptable effort.
Graphics: 5/10
Pretty basic graphics, 2d sprites, not enough frames to show movements, takes pretty much from the game, there is not even a cute intro or some movies. Also Diablo II had 640x480 resolution and sprites based graphics, though all together made a little better impression.
Sound: 4/10
These cannot be called sounds, anyway they will give you an idea of what is happening, for sure graphics and sound together will not let you be able to get deep into your character.
Gameplay: 3/10
Well going around pressing over the enemies may not be too boring at first, though after few minutes you will find that there are way too many monsters around and this will highly slow down the gaming experience. Everything else is just normal... stores to buy stuff, enemies, gold... really nothing new. The click over enemy to fight it (a la Diablo), given the huge number of enemies makes the game pretty useless.
Overall 4.0/10
This would have been a good gaming project for a single guy, and probably this is indeed one man work. It may be even funny to play after a while, looking often to live points and using healing potions, though I do not absolutely know any reason to get this game instead of lately released games like Diablo 2.
There's been a long tradition in the PC gaming world to make cheap rip-offs of pre-existing games. How many atrocious real-time strategy games did Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty influence? If there were no Castle Wolfenstein would we have had Extreme Paintbrawl? And so on... Now we have The Broken Lands, a game not only inspired by Diablo and its sequel, but pretty much a discount knock-off of the series.
When I opened the box, all that fell out was a jewel case. Now I knew this was a cheap Diablo II clone, so I wasn't expecting much, but perhaps a manual would help a bit. After I opened the case I found out the manual was on the disc, but it's so poorly translated that it's almost useless and, as basic as this game is, there are obvious gameplay omissions in the digital manual. The in-game menus consist of "New Game" and "Load Game"...that's it. Want to change the graphics? Hope you have a computer science degree and can change the code. Controls awkward to use? Too bad.
The story behind The Broken Land is just as contrived as the game itself. Apparently the gods get together for an important "State of Heaven" meeting. An evil priest breaks into the meeting (Obviously Heaven is a bit easier to get into than we first thought...especially for evil priests. Well won't Jim Baker be happy?), a big battle ensues, Heaven is shattered into five pieces, and requisite evil beasts are unleashed on the land. That's where you come in. You don't have to save the world this time around...you have to save Heaven by finding the five relics and fusing the lands of Heaven back into one divine mass.
Now this particular plot twist is interesting to me. If the entire world is now "evil," maybe you should just deal with it. I mean, it's all relative, right? None of the "good" people are left except for you, and the monsters and creatures don't seem to have a problem with each other since they aren't smacking each other in the face, so maybe you're the "evil" one since they're all going after you. I know this is an aspect in every "Diablo-type" game, but it was just ridiculous in The Broken Land. You couldn't walk half a screen without being jumped by 20 or 30 monsters. Save a smattering of jailed NPCs that join your party and the few scattered merchants, there's absolutely no one to interact with. Since it's just a steady stream of click, click, click, click, click for hours, gameplay is boring and tedious after only a few minutes. The only depth in the game is the ability to upgrade your weapons and armor with magical gems (sound familiar?) and the few scant skills that your characters gain as they progress through the game, but even they're unrewarding, and you really get no sense of why you're actually going through all of this tedium.
To make matters worse, you can't customize your character much in the game. While you can upgrade your arms and armor, you can only carry one weapon and one defensive piece at any given time, so once you start upgrading a weapon or piece of armor, there's really no need to upgrade anything else you find during the game, because it will usually already be less powerful than the weapon or armor you already have.
The visuals aren't much better than the gameplay. The game literally looks like something out of the early Amiga days. Sure, the character stills look pretty good, but the game itself just looks flat and horribly dated. Spell effects, while colorful, are the same for almost every spell, except ice spells are blues and fire spells are red. Text is blurry, the primitive and recurring monster models are overused, and the simple character models are plain and don't even display details such as eyes or mouths, resembling large flesh-colored bags carrying staffs, axes, or bows. I could go on, but I think you get the point.
In an attempt to make sure the entire game disappoints, the music and sound effects follow the style of the graphics and gameplay. The two-minute music loop gets very annoying after about, well, two minutes, and there's no way to turn it off. Plus the sound effects for the creatures are more often than not just canned monkey and dog sound clips. Now as much as we like monkeys here, having an obvious eep, eep emanating from the mouth of a gigantic evil beast that I'm supposed to be fearful of is just laughable. I just wanted to wrap that tri-horned demon up in diapers, put him in a movie with Ronald Reagan, and wait for the laughter to ensue. Oh look, Bonzoria the Unconquerable is throwing creamed spinach at Ronnie...ha, ha. Oh man, look...now he's firing a firebolt through his chest. Hoooo-wheee, do we have a Hollywood blockbuster there! What's even worse is the music streams directly off the CD, causing the game to stutter every couple of minutes as that same damn CD track loads up, and as I've mentioned before, there's no way to adjust the sound settings. Arrrgggghhhhh!!!
It's games like this that make me wondering if developers and publishers actually make money off this regurgitated crap. We can only assume since this is the first we've ever heard of this publisher and developer, the answer is no.
People who downloaded Broken Land, The have also downloaded:
Chosen, The: Well of Souls, Blade & Sword, Clans, COPS 2170: The Power of Law, Breath of Fire 4, Crusaders of Might and Magic, Blind Justice, Blaze & Blade: Eternal Quest
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