Having played a fair bit of it, my opinion can best be summed up by a resounding "meh."
Really, it's Diablo 2 (or Torchlight, assuming those two are considered 'different'), with a couple of really minor gimmicks. Instead of one character, you have three, which you can switch between more-or-less at will. Which, really, means you play the pet class until his pets die, then switch to your tank until his health gets low, then switch to your fast guy and run like hell.
Instead of a single character that you get to lovingly advance through the missions, you get to choose from (apparently) 100 different heroes. Which translates to, "Hope you don't actually want to get attached to one character, because there's 99 others out there!", as well as "You didn't
really want to customize your character's abilities, did you?"
The Spore character creator is, at best a token gesture - whereas Spore let you make a whole creature (which, let's face it, was basically
all you could do in Spore!), Darkspore only lets you customize a few token pieces of armour. Basically, it's the clothing creator from Spore. Oh, and since each 'part' is a piece of equipment with stats, any attempt at "character customization" comes down to "where can I fit this stupid
helmet-thingy with
+8 dexterity so that it won't look like crap?" Beyond that, you're stuck with the developer's 100 different creature designs, which may look professional but pretty much defeats the purpose of having a cool character creation engine in the first place.
Oh, and remember, there's no skill tree, which makes equipment the
only thing you can use to power up your character. Heck, not only does equipment give bonuses, the equipment your heroes wear
also decides their levels, so when given the choice between keeping a cool-looking piece of loot, or swapping to a superior-stat item that looks like garbage, there's really only one valid option.
Mission design is... frankly, it's pants-on-head retarded. The game just
loves to introduce new game mechanics seconds before a horde attacks. Seriously, in the first (real) mission, the game unlocks your second ability just as a horde attacks, meaning that you've got no time to actually read the tooltips and figure out what the heck said new ability
does (never mind what your
other two heroes just unlocked, because there's no chance in hell you'll be reading their ability tooltips before the attack begins!). Then, they do it
again by introducing some orb system that I probably would've liked to hear about, but was too busy preparing for a horde, not to mention trying to figure out where the heck this 'orb' they kept talking about even was! (It spawns
after they've spent a minute talking about it.
)
Even if you ignore their incompetence in introducing new mechanics, the levels are mostly linear runs with a bit of sidetracking to find extra loot. I've yet to see any puzzle more complicated than "blow up this object to get an advantage in combat!", although admittedly the devs had enough creativity to reskin the explosive barrels of each area.
Enemy design is a strong point, at least - enemies have a nice variety of skills and abilities. Sadly, this makes your
lack of skill variety all the more obvious. Seriously, "lots of interesting enemies" would be a lot cooler if every enemy in the game couldn't be three-shotted from halfway across the screen by a ranged character. Or one-shotted by my tank's AoE ability. Maybe if the opposition didn't explode into gibblets at the mere sight of my hero approaching, their skill variety would be cooler.
Final notes? Regenerating health and energy are both out, and there are no potions - you recharge by picking up drops from enemies. This is actually a nice improvement, in many ways - you don't have to sit around bored between fights, nor can you power through a boss by chugging potions, and having one hero get low on health provides a good reason to switch to a benched hero for a while. Still, it's a little awkward to finish a battle at full health because you kept collecting health drops. The game also ditches Diablo's open-world towns for a hub-based mission system; given that it's a game designed for cooperative ventures into space, I'd have expected a persistent world to be more fun than a matchmaking hub.
If this game was a $10 indie release, I'd buy it on the spot. But a full-priced $50 release? For a game that is basically a trimmed-down Diablo clone? I think not.
Author
Topic: Darkspore Beta On Steam (Read 1009 times)