Review
Release Date: 03.20.2003
Platform:
XboxDeveloper:
Idea FactoryPublisher:
Xicat Interactive, Ltd.Reviewed by
Jeremy Barnes on 7.16.2005
It's been done and done and done once more for good measure throughout gaming. Some game designers out there just love a game so much that they decide to make a game that's almost just like it.
Blackstone: Magic and Steel takes the formula from games like
Gauntlet and
Champions of Norrath: Realms of EverQuest and does absolutely nothing to improve upon it. Actually, it does a lot to make that formula worse.
The biggest problem facing
Blackstone is that it never follows through on any of the facets of gameplay. They throw in a couple good ideas like combo attacks, dinosaurs that you can ride, and some unlockable skins for each class, but they don't flesh those features out. That leaves
Blackstone as exactly what it is; a horrible clone.
The game starts out fairly interesting with a nice cinematic introduction telling of the impending doom if the great evil manages to collect all the shards of the Blackstone. The designers tried to inject some depth into the story, but failed miserably. Mostly due to the fact that the hack & slash genre doesn't need the shallowest attempt at a deep storyline. The long drawn out story sequences with the monotone deep voice imparting an increasingly ridiculous means of collecting the next shard just serves to take the player away from the game. Of course, it may have been some designer's sense of humanity kicking in to prevent gamers from suffering through actually playing the game.
The gameplay consists of your character moving around to whack enemies. Oh, and your character moves very, very slowly. This means you will have to deal with more enemies who have roughly the same IQ as Carrot Top. The game is simply a button mashing fest; you continually press attack until two hours later you have moved about two inches across the screen to destroy the thing that is spewing out the monsters. Then you get to do that about 50 more times per level.
While there is more than the one close range attack, you can literally complete the game using only that one move. There are other attacks like a ranged attack that can even be powered up, but awkward targeting and the slow speed of the attack itself make it fairly useless. An old guy on a street corner once told me to stick with what ya know...the makers of Blackstone wanted to hammer that point home by making everything that isn't your close range attack unnecessary.
There is a power up move for magic, but magic is limited by scrolls and it takes a few of them to use it. So your close range attack that sucks a little bit of life and is a 360 sweep is more useful. If your playing with a friend however, you can do a two person distance attack that will obliterate everything on the screen and is quite possibly more useful than your standard close range attack.
The last useless tidbit that's thrown to players is the ability to ride dinosaurs. These are some big bad beasties and you can climb on top and put that power between your legs where it belongs. Amazingly enough, in the face of the ultimate regular close –up attack of not quite doom, this is fairly useless as well. The dinosaurs while looking nice suffer from a poor attack. It's slow; it's straight forward and not nearly powerful enough to justify its use.
The existence of Blackstone itself can barely be justified. The best part about the game is the box. The box has some nifty artwork on the front to lure unsuspecting gamers in and then the back boasts off some impressive features like 26 huge levels which aren't really so huge and half of them are just bosses with no actual level at all. The box describes the non-stop four player action, but fails to mention that is because walking is technically action.
It's not all bad though. The game doesn't look that bad. The environments are colorful and manage to not look like something from RPGmaker. They actually look a lot better than that and are a step up from
Gauntlet. The monsters and characters do have some detail to them, but not enough to cause slowdown when you get a mass of them on screen. The characters are rendered poorly though and some filters make the game appear downright ugly at times, but this is a
Gauntlet clone so bad graphics are among the top of the line in the genre.
That is the only place it takes a step above
Gauntlet though. The sound effects and voiceovers are part of the copycat syndrome. The music sounds very much like something composed on an old Apple IIe green screen computer. The music tends to fit the level which is something that is generally ignored in game design. You don't come across anything like having a hardcore metal track in a fairy village.
You'll need a fairy godmother watching over you when you play
Blackstone or at least a friend. The multiplayer is almost enough to redeem the game into the “worth a few bucks anyway” category. It's like watching a bad campy horror film with friends. It's just so bad you can't play it alone, but with a friend there the amusement factor of it is increased by up to 11 times.
There is virtually no reason to play this gameunless you are an addict of the genre. We're talking the obsessed sort of addict here who doesn't actually use their real name anymore because being called the Mighty Xandar of the Sub-Region of Netharferuld when you're really just some kid living in your parent's basement because the giant ball of fire floating in the sky outside is scary.
Buying this game should only be done as an act of desperation or if you'd like to have some pretty box art. Avid fans of the series will find it amusing for a very short time, but most gamers won't even want to bother with it after the first five minutes. This is one of those games that should be bought when it's $5 in the bargain bin so you can go to World War II veteran meeting and talk about your own horror story. This game will leave you with nightmares.
