Re: The Remastered Lone Wolf HD game.
It's......ok.
Even though Dever wrote the story, it definitely is not what you'd find in the Lone Wolf books. In the books, the story covers a pretty large geographic area. In sort of movie style you globe trot, the Darklords are always on your heels, there's betrayers everywhere....
In the game, the story is much more localized. You're going out to investigate some Giak stuff in your Freylund. Each chapter is an area you run around and do stories in.
Unlike the LW books, you can see the story paths in the video game and can retread other areas you passed up, whereas there's usually no going back in LW stories.
Unfortunately, the QTE combat takes up the vast majority of game time, and there's not a ton of variety. 4 hours played and I've seen Giaks and Drakkarim, of two or three varieties (foot soldier, leader, champion.) There's no fights with bandits, desperate crazed village folk or encounters with the panoply of monsters in the LW universe. Obviously because someone had to create an animate these things. I know there's more encounters later on, but there's been a lot of repetition in the 1st/2nd chapters of the game.
The QTE combat is actually fairly tough. Since your dodge rating effects how often you can QTE dodge many attacks, really tough fights sort of come down to randomness (whether the enemies hit you with a light attack or heavy attack, whether they crit, whether they use other unavoidable abilities like bombs, whether they just decide to taunt you, whether you trigger a QTE dodge.)
You have several powerful abilities, each with a cooldown, and each which uses resources like Endurance or Kai Power to activate. Potions that refill these pools are also on lengthy cooldowns. So combat against a fight that's actually tough is in large part luck, and a good portion timing and choosing when and what to use. Blow all your cooldowns and potions early in the fight, and chances are you will be caught defeneless as the fight is nearing its end and you'll probably lose. Enemies hit you for between 1/5th and 1/3rd of your life per hit, and bosses hit like freight trains. So while combat is repetitious, you do have to pay attention.
The rules system is barely derived from the LW books. You pick a focus (strength, cunning, intelligence) which basically becomes on of your available story actions. Then you pick 4 disciplines (drawn from the books), which are both story options AND yield abilities in combat. As you do stuff in stories, the game tracks what choices you make, and at predetermined points in the story it will total these up and increase your stats according to what you did, kinda like Morrowind. So if you pick a lot of intelligence options you'll see a hefty raise in your intelligence, ie. Kai Power pool and ability damage. When you pick some story options, more QTE events will pop up to determine whether you succeeded or failed; substituting themselves for the die roll. What his basically means is, if you have the ability, you're going to succeed.
There's lots of gear and consumables and picks ups to earn through combat or the occasional story choice, and you can upgrade armor and weapons using these materials. However it all feels very video game-y. Anything you loot as a purpose in game or in combat; any item that relates to questing doesn't actually take inventory space. So unlike the books where you might find useless items or items with questionable purposes, here, it's all very cut and dry.
The music is nice, the art is slick and slightly animated. The UI animations are complete overkill though. Way too many of them. The combat looks OK if a little barren. My biggest two gripes are a) Lone Wolf doesn't have the Kai green cloak, and b) he has made some...questionable facial hair choices, like the arrow-shaped mutton chops.
All in all it's not bad, but I don't know if it's worth the $13 I paid, other than the fact it has probably 8 to 10 solid hours of game play. The story simply isn't that engaging compared to the epic nature of the rest of the Lone Wolf books. The situation isn't desperate, the stakes aren't high, the danger is middling (so far), and the biggest key note character is someone I think Dever deliberately tried to write the opposite of how most characters interact with LW: she doesn't like you. She doesn't trust you. She belittles your heroic efforts to save her, her father and her worthless ass town. I respect the writing decision but if I'm going to spend this much time around a character, I should have a reason for liking them and this chick makes herself patently unlikable.
So if you're really jonesing for a real video game adaptation of Lone Wolf, this will do. But it's not Lone Wolf's finest hour, in my estimation.
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Topic: Lone Wolf & Project Aon: SeventhSense 1.16.1 update - Books 1-16 playable! (Read 19880 times)