Neverend, like other games before it from Mayhem Studios (Empire of Magic, anyone?), had a lot of potential and promised a lot of nice features, but in the end couldn't deliver on any of those fronts. The game is an unmitigated mess of technical issues and features sewn together like Frankenstein, and about as appealing as the sum of its miss-matched parts. It's a shame, because beneath all the chaos of this game design, there are some interesting elements that are fun - it's getting to that point that is frustrating.

At face value Neverend is a 3D role-playing game where players take on the unlikely heroine named Agavaen, fresh off of a heist with her pirate crew and headed for a confrontation with a pirate captain that thinks girls are apparently "icky" and bring curses. The captain's crazy objections aside, it is at the very beginning that we begin to see the cracks in Neverend's plaster. The voice acting in the game is just awful, delivered with such a lack of emotion that you'll think you're watching a bad fifth grade school play. We can overlook that and turn it off completely to follow the storyline a bit - bad voice acting isn't a mortal sin in game design considering the global nature of the business these days.

So let's talk about the gameplay. First the game uses an interesting series of overland maps connected together and filled with towns, random encounters, static encounters and quests. The view during exploration is top down like Gauntlet, which works well enough. As you explore you find small areas (like the camp area in the beginning of the game) that phases into third-person perspective for easier exploring. There's certainly plenty to explore in the game at the start and there's plenty of treasure and quests to partake in depending on where you go.

It is when you begin exploring the world that you'll immediately notice that the difficulty level needs to be scaled. You'll go from level one enemies to level 6 in a matter of seconds and you'll quickly find yourself dead if you jump into the wrong encounter. Most of these difficult encounters are related to static areas on the map like treasure spots guarded by monsters so it's really a big deal, but as you delve deeper into the game world you'll realize that it takes a lot to level up in the beginning of the game and you'll do most of it through these random encounters that go from level 1 - whatever at the drop of a hat. There's no rhyme or reason for why all these encounters are so out of whack sometimes. It's another aspect of the game that you can get by but it makes you a lot more cautious than normal - even for a role-playing game where you are expected to save a lot.

The real fun part of the game is the combat. Neverend uses a combat system that gives you special attacks based on the weapons you use. For example, you'll get a different attack for using a sword than using a hammer or short sword. As you gain levels these attacks get stronger and you use less SP (the equivalent of action points in the game). The game is phase turn-based, meaning that depending what action you choose and how much SP it takes, ultimately decides who gets to attack whom first. For the most part this is a pretty good system. Occasionally in combat you may encounter another oddity - a bug that lets dead enemies continue to attack you. They'll get up off the ground like Lazarus in the good book and do some damage just for fun. And this isn't one of those bugs that happens occasionally - it's a frequent occurrence that will agitate you until the battle is over.

Players can, of course use items during combat and the game's own unique brand of magic to defeat enemies. Magic is another part of the game that may have some gamers scratching their heads. Before getting to how it all works there's one thing that just doesn't make sense: if you aren't in combat you can't cast magic. That's right - if you're wandering around the overland map injured after a tough battle you'd better have some potions on you to take care of the problem, because magic is off the menu. This is probably one of the oddest implementations of a magic system I've seen in a long time.

That oddness aside, Neverend uses a magic system that lets you put spells together using special runes and recipes. You create these recipes by choosing a starting rune and then using whatever the recipe calls for, ending the line-up of runes with an "ending rune." When you have it all together you'll either create a new spell in your spell list of fail and consume the runes you were using. You can find runes everywhere, along with recipes from enemy battles and from merchants all over the land, so that part isn't all that stressful. The magic system works out in the end, but not including the ability to use magic when not in combat is just a very bizarre design choice.

Finally it should be noted that getting Neverend to work on a PC in its current state is really a lesson in hit or miss. During the course of reviewing the game I installed it on four different machines that all met or exceeded the game's minimum system requirements. Of those the game only worked on two machines. And of those two the game run like molasses on one system and crashed a lot on the other. Neverend sure does like to crash no matter what system it's on.

In the end it's hard to recommend Neverend on any level. Even if you can forgive Neverend's strange design, it's tough to get by the fact that installing it on your machine and getting it to work is a real crap shoot.