Review

This is a game that probably would have made a much more favorable impression on me had I not played it immediately after having spent many months playing Diablo 2. Darkstone is an unabashed reinterpretation of the Diablo games, with a garden variety 3D engine as its distinguishing characteristic. To be more accurate, it's modeled exclusively after the first Diablo game, having been released prior to Diablo 2. One look at the inventory will reveal the extent to which Darkstone imitates Diablo. But here's the rub: Darkstone fails mostly because of this imitation. When you imitate a game with exceedingly weak gameplay, you get a game with weak gameplay. Any redeeming values that Darkstone possesses, and there are a few, stem directly from things that violate the imitation.

The first of these redeeming values is the nature of the quests. While many of the quests in Darkstone distill to the basic "kill this" or "retrieve that" errand, the manner in which you accomplish them is much more entertaining than anything encountered in Diablo 2. The obstacles presented to the player are often puzzles, or riddles, requiring actual thought. Because of this feature alone, Darkstone does what Diablo 2 never did: provide the player with opportunities to be clever; not necessarily very clever, but clever nonetheless. Furthermore, whereas in Diablo 2 the quests were completely identical across all of the difficulty settings, in Darkstone when you transition your character into a higher difficulty you encounter potentially different quests. The quests are chosen from a categorized pool, apparently, and whenever you create a new character, or restart the game at a higher difficulty with an existing character, the quests you encounter are randomly selected from the pool. There aren't a plethora of quests, so you'll get repeats, but it's still a much greater incentive to replay the game.

The next thing that distinguishes Darkstone is the 3D engine. It's not going to knock your socks off or sell video cards, but it's still nice. The spell effects are fun, and the game is colorful and enjoyable to watch. I'm particularly fond of the torch and I manufactured excuses to use it, since it's rarely required. As I said in my Rune review, any game that lets me brandish a torch gets brownie points in my book. At any rate, the 3D engine is modest. The particle effects are neat, but the characters have an obscenely frugal polygon budget. The levels, both indoor and outdoor, are all essentially 2D, which facilitates their random generation, but their 2D nature doesn't negatively affect the game at all. Darkstone is a game that would have benefitted hugely from being more scalable. I played it a full two years after its release, and had enough horsepower that I could've easily played the game at 1600x1200, with probably an order of magnitude increase in polygons. Unfortunately, Darkstone commits the crime common of first generation 3D accelerated games: fixed resolution and low poly; despite the fact that it's not a first generation 3D accelerated game. It's too bad that Delphine seemed to have abandoned the game not long after release, because it would have aged really well with a little bit of attention from them.

A final noteworthy feature of Darkstone is that it allows you to simultaneously play with two characters. This is only an option in single-player games, but it's still a neat concept. You can form your own personal "party" when starting a game, selecting any two characters you've created. In the game, you'll only control one of the pair at any given time, but can freely switch between them. Whichever character you aren't manually controlling behaves according to the AI, which generally does a pretty good job of keeping the character both alive and in the thick of things. On paper, it's a real crime that this dual-character feature isn't available in multiplayer games. Partnering up with people online or in a LAN, where each player had a duo at their command, would be a nifty way to crank up the scale of combat. In practice, though, the levels don't lend themselves very well to larger scale battles, so it turns out that even if you could use two characters, a multiplayer game would quickly run out of elbowroom. In fact, the dungeon levels on average aren't roomy enough to even accommodate just two characters very well. That's part of the reason why I didn't give Darkstone a higher score on co-op play. A friend and I completed Darkstone in co-op play, and had to really condition ourselves to habitually make way for the other person to participate in fights. Fortunately, I had made the decision to play with a thief, which primarily made use of ranged weapons, and my friend was using a monk which he tailored towards melee, so as a combination we mitigated the physical constraints of the levels somewhat. Even so, frequently one or the other of us would wind up blocking a doorway and preventing the other player from advancing or fighting.

While I'm on the topic of the levels, I want to mention that for the same reason they didn't accommodate multiple people in a room, they also made the AI creatures act more stupidly than they probably really were. Every doorway in a dungeon made the perfect, prefabricated bottleneck. All you have to do is stand by the door, and the creatures will stream through in an orderly fashion, one by one. This is a big reason why the game was never particularly challenging. Even in areas where the creatures would have posed a legitimate threat, you had to be decidedly negligent to get your character into a compromising situation.

Besides the inherently unfulfilling gameplay that it adopted from Diablo, Darkstone ultimately suffers from two other major deficiencies. The first of which is the interface. On the surface, things work much like they do in Diablo/Diablo 2, and as far as that goes, it's just dandy. Darkstone actually preempted Diablo 2 with the ability to hold-click a target and sustain attacks, as opposed to requiring a single click per attack. Rather, the problem with the interface involves primarily the difficulty involved in customizing or altering it. To alter the key-bindings, you have to edit an arcane keyboard.txt file that contains no comments whatsoever or even a list of the available key enumerations. You cannot do anything to customize the interface from within the game. Furthermore, it wasn't until the v1.03 patch that you could customize the keys controlling camera movement. That fact alone would justify a [-2] interface score. Keep in mind that this game was released in 1999, a good 3 years after Quake, and well past the time when interface flexibility had become par for the course for numerous genres. I know games with RPG trappings have traditionally been the most negligent when it comes to interface design, but that's no excuse, and it's especially no excuse in 1999, when your game sits on shelves alongside the likes of Unreal Tournament, Freespace 2, Age of Empires 2, etc.. Furthermore, as soon as you throw 3D into a game, the tolerance for an unaccommodating interface drops to nigh zero.

Independent of the keybinding problem, another major issue was the lack of options for camera behavior. Again, this is a problem that really only manifests when 3D is involved, but manifest it does. I was able to get along fairly well with the default (nay only) scheme, which keeps your camera orientation independent of the direction that your character is facing or moving. The friend with whom I frequently played, however, was not comfortable with it at all, and never stopped pining for a more traditional 3rd person perspective camera behavior such as found in Heretic 2, where the camera stays "over the shoulder" of your character, and as the character rotates, so does the camera. To answer the immediate question of how to manage this when you control two characters: easy, the camera follows whichever character you're actively controlling. I could definitely sympathize with him, and might have employed such a scheme as well had it been available. We'll never know, because the fact of the matter is that there is very little you can do to alter the behavior of the camera. There is a fixed, overhead (almost orthographic) camera mode that some people might prefer, which gives the game a more Rage of Mages look.

There were a few excellent aspects of the interface that ultimately prevented me from giving the game a shameful [-2]. First is the use of transparency. The engine does an excellent job keeping your field of view clear, so that you can always see your character. As objects or parts of the architecture obstruct your view, they are rendered with a nice level of transparency, allowing you to notice their existence without losing sight of what's around you or what your character is doing. Another saving grace of the interface is the ability to auto-navigate to places. In the overland areas, you can use a map view to see the locations you've visited, and if you just click on any area on the map, your character (or party) will make its way to that location. Similarly, you'll have access to a list of people and places both in town and in dungeons that provide you the same functionality: just click on the name and you'll make your way there automatically. This is hugely convenient. Let me say it again for emphasis: this is hugely convenient. It's also, believe it or not, a lot of fun. When my character was on an automated jaunt to someplace, I would often take the opportunity to just play with the camera, and do cinematic sweeps and zooms around my thief as he hustled determinedly to his destination. This is an example of the little nuggets of fun that can emerge in a game unintentionally. Lastly, a couple of other nice little features of the game are the ability to assign the order for cycling through spells and skills, and the ability to have the heal spell autocast.

I said there were two major deficiencies in Darkstone. The second is the game's robustness, and of course by that I mean its lack thereof. This is one of the most finicky games I've every played, with respect to how poorly it is immune to hardware configurations. Darkstone was apparently allergic to the computer that I was using at the time, because I had to perform copious amounts of geekery to get the game stable, consisting mostly of changing BOTH the video card AND the sound card. Needless to say, that's ridiculous. Still, I really struggled with myself over whether or not Darkstone deserved a [-2] score for robustness. Once I found a configuration that the game found palatable, things went fairly well, other than chronic, but not too frequent, crash-to-the-desktop failures when playing multiplayer. Still, what made me hesitate to completely lambaste the game for robustness was the fact that my friend never experienced a single problem. Furthermore, when I installed the game on my current machine for the purposes of this review, the game was like a little Betty Boop, all dimples and smiles and batting eyelids. It only took a short bout of reflection, however, to know that Darkstone deserved a very low robustness score and deserved it big time. I remembered the Darkstone forums (which appear to be dead at the moment). I remembered that the forums were littered with the posts of people completely unable to play the game, or unable to play it with sound, or unable to play multiplayer. (NOTE: a good percentage of the problems seemed to stem from the game's incompatibility with several generations of NVidia drivers.) Apparently, not everyone has spare parts lying around that they can put into their box just to play a quirky Diablo clone.

I recognize that PC gaming is a briar patch of hardware compatibility problems. I've decided that when a game has these kinds of issues, it should be penalized severely only if the developer/publisher don't put immediate effort into rectifying the problem. Ideally, these issues get both discovered and fixed during beta testing, but this is often a matter of a company's budget, so I'll grant them an opportunity to redeem themselves post-release. Other times, though, it's obviously just a matter of negligence, and I believe this is the case for Darkstone. The negligence persisted, as evidenced by the patches. The v1.04 patch is solely for the purpose of enabling custom skins, and the v1.05b patch is for gameplay tweaks. So this is another example of the game turning into landfill for someone who encounters a compatibility problem.

Final Thoughts

Is Darkstone fun? As always, it depends on you. For myself, it was entertaining enough to get me through it once. As with Diablo 2, though, a good deal of its entertainment came from the ability to play cooperatively with a friend. I can't stress enough just how inherently enjoyable it is to play an immersive game with a friend at your side instead of in your gun sights. Ultimately, though, Darkstone suffered from the same fundamentally flawed gameplay as its counterparts. The interface and robustness problems could have been swept under the rug, and would not have kept me from playing the game had it been more rewarding. Graphically, and stylistically, the game has a lot of charm. The quest editor that was made available could have really given this game some long legs... if there was more to the gameplay. It's conceivable that someone could craft a set of quests for this game that had creative story-telling so strong that the tale alone would keep me entertained. The truth of the matter, though, is that my book shelves are lined with compelling stories. I don't need to look under rocks for a good yarn.

Tips

• You can use your mousewheel to cycle through the spells/skills to which you've assigned a sequence number. The ability to use the mousewheel is mentioned only in the readme, it's not in the manual.

• Also not mentioned in the manual: if you have the heal spell as your active spell, it will autocast for you when your health gets low. You can drag a small threshold line on your mana bar to set a limit for the autocasting. When your mana falls below the line, you'll no longer autocast.