Revenant

Pros • Tons of different armors. Your character can constantly look different • Fighting combinations are so groovy you can't help but feel like "the Dude" when you pull them off • Grinding spiders' heads into the ground - endlessly amusing • Huge surges of pleasure from killing Druhgs • Gain experience in skills as well as levels • Monsters of different types automatically attack one another (No cheap computer cheating and ganging up on the player here)	Cons • NPC interaction is limited • Regardless of what you do/say in RPG mode, the end result is always the same • The interface is weird. Do I use the mouse or the keyboard? It's a pain switching back and forth • Shadowing can be so deep, you'll miss chests and important objects • Multiplayer? Hello? It's in the program to have it on Mplayer - OK so where is it? • Story could be better
Bottom Line Pretty standard RPG a la Diablo style. It's the combat that saves the game. To say that I enjoyed the first couple hours of Revenant would be a complete fabrication. In fact, I loaded it up several times only to sneer at graphics that look a couple years behind the time, groan at the frustrating RPG that allows you no creativity or freedom, then disgustedly snap it off again. Ultimately I rolled up my sleeves and halfheartedly set about playing a Diablo style game that I could tell was going to suck. After a couple of hours, once I got to the part where I could do some killing, the whole thing changed and it became pretty damn cool. Too bad they'll have lost most gamers by then.

My bitching and moaning reverberated throughout the office, "What the ...? Rah Ragh Rrrr Snarp! Oh this is stupid! I can't believe that you they won't let you ... What? You mean I can't... ARGH!" That of course being the beginning of the game where the main problem was that the story was only marginally involving. As with so many games of this genre, all you do is wander around town making no difference in anyone's life, not even your own. Once you finally get out of the town and experience your first hostile encounters however, you will be delighted to discover that the pitiful death rattles of the Druhg sound remarkably close to how we've all imagined Jar Jar Binks would if he were savagely murdered. There are other equally entertaining moments such as when your guy, the Revenant, places his foot on a monster's head and grinds it into the ground. Ahhh... With tactics like that you don't even need the background story to know that the Revenant is a scumbag. Forget the fact that his soul was in hell for millennia; sniff the air and smell the blood.

The concept behind the storyline is rather appealing and would have been great with some polishing: Drawn back from a Dante-esque imprisonment by the Wizard Sardok, you are forced into the service of the local ruler Lord Tendrick. It seems that priests of The Children of Change cult have kidnapped Tendrick's daughter, and you are the best man to bring her back. So what if the townspeople are scared of you? You don't care about them anyway. You're only doing this because Sardok's magic is compelling you to.

The graphics, as you will undoubtedly be quick to notice, are shabby as compared to some of the beautifully rendered 3D stuff out there. While that will certainly turn off a lot of people, they gain points for the great animation that so many of the different characters, spells and potions have. Another graphical element that is clever is the way in which you can constantly modify your clothing. When you get a new suit of armor, which you can change piece by piece, the little guy on the screen alters his appearance accordingly.

For years I've held fantasies of being the superhero, so you can understand that any RPG which allows us to pull funky Kung-fu combinations gets bonus points. The fast action fighting is the truly the main pleasure in this game: dodge, turn, spin, parry, thrust, spiky-boot-to-the-groin, hack, hack, hack. Cleverly, to keep the fighting fresh, you need to return to the weapons master on a number of occasions in order to learn the new combat maneuvers with which to smite your foes. Based on what the book says, there should be 9. I'm not sure how to learn that 9th one however because by the time you have enough experience, there is one cheap "screw the player over" move that the game pulls on you that leaves the designers in need of a beating: the weapons master won't train you anymore once you fall from the light and embrace evil as the only way to stop the cult that you have been brought back from hell to destroy. It's not the fact that the Revenant will choose evil no matter what you do that's the problem, it's that you don't have a choice as to when this happens, so chances are you won't get to learn that final move. Bad Karma for them.

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