Between Diablo, Dungeon Siege, Titan’s Quest, and now Mage Knight Apocalypse, there has certainly been no shortage of memorable hack-n-slash adventures to indulge in over the years. Some of these have taken off with surprising levels of popularity too, each with their own unique implementation of ways to run around slaying ghouls or whatever and saving the world once again, but I’ve tended to keep a somewhat impartial distance from some of the newer releases - maybe I’m just weary of seeing variations on the same basic formula happening again and again. Avoiding Mage Knight: Apocalypse would have been a mistake, however, and when a friend of mine suggested it for a LAN party, indulging was probably one of the better choices I could have made.

For those not familiar (I actually wasn’t at first either), MK: Apocalypse is based on the popular “Mage Knight” universe – which has its roots in the kind of miniature table-top war games that WizKids Inc. is renowned for. The universe has a very detailed and interesting fantasy backstory to it, and developer Interserv International has taken the challenge upon themselves to convert this into a PC game format, for all to enjoy. From a personal standpoint I feel this is a good thing, as it’s certainly raised my own awareness of the franchise, but does MK: Apocalypse actually make for a game that is both accessible, and immensely enjoyable? To answer, it certainly can, but perhaps after a few revisions first.

I’ll clarify shortly, but to begin with, an introduction. The storyline for the game focuses on a group of five adventurers, bestowed with the title of “Oathsworn”. This basically grants them the bonus of being inter-continental superheroes fighting for good and justice and whatnot, but the game’s relatively dark universe plunges them into a good deal of danger. When the game starts off, players can choose from one of five character types to begin their adventure, and will then pick up allies from the other four choices as they go along and the storyline progresses. As for the plot? A sudden swath of evil is cutting its way across the lands, defiling temples and plundering ancient artifacts in an attempt to bring about a new apocalypse. Guided by a mysterious floating avatar from a race known as the “Solonavi”, the Oathsworn must investigate and put a stop to the evil before it consumes the land.

What I’ve just stated is actually a gross simplification of the plot, and there are of course many factions and characters that come into play to help make the game infinitely more interesting. Maybe there was just something I found amusing about watching a Dwarf wielding a literal rotary minigun ramble on about his war against the Atlantean slavers, but I actually felt a much closer connection to the game universe than with past hack-and-slash titles, just because the in-game cut scenes were quite well presented, and consisted of a good deal more than just static NPCs talking to you (though this is something I noticed Dungeon Siege II also partly addressed) – and even includes half-decent voice acting to boot. I wouldn’t call it award-winning scripting, but the extra effort the developers were taking to try and draw me into the storyline was both evident and very much appreciated. Players get the chance to learn plenty about the various races inhabiting the game universe, and assorted NPCs are all too happy to provide more plot information for players who want to listen. If there was one plot-related complaint I had, it would just be in that there aren’t really any major path deviations available, and players are basically locked to the objectives set before them – so the linearity might be an offset for some gamers looking for more groundbreaking approaches.

But as I mentioned, there are five classes to choose from: The Dwarf Gunner, the Vampire, the Amazon, the Draconum Mage, and the Elven Paladin. Each character actually has their own unique name and little backstory that ties into the storyline, but gameplay-wise this translates into five selectable classes that can augment each other in battle. My personal favorite choice for a first play-through was a Dwarf, simply because of the aforementioned minigun fetish (Dwarves actually get access to all kinds of cool guns and weapons, and can do pyrotechnics too with the right ingredients), but I tried out the Paladin character on my second run and found an equally enjoyable experience with the long halberds and multitude of archery-styled weapons at my disposal. The “Draconum” mage is basically just a walking, talking dragon that had it’s wings clipped (and as such can’t fly – much to my disappointment), but offers a wide variety of cool spells, and even gets the eventual ability to temporarily morph into a cool “Dragonform”. Meanwhile, the Amazon pretty much offers the expected level of butt-kicking, while the Vampire (or Vampiress rather) resembles a BDSM queen – though I couldn’t comment in any more detail as I haven’t toyed with these other classes extensively. What sets each class apart are their respective skill trees, which of course define their abilities, but players also must make further choices as time goes on – only because given skills increase by usage, and each class actually has three tiers of skills to choose from (for example, Dwarves get ranged, melee, and explosive trees to work from), making for plenty of abilities to work with.

Now here’s where those needed modifications I mentioned earlier start to come into play. After spending a good deal of time with the game (and after applying the first-released patch, which fixes a wide number of problems – though sadly future updates are apparently on the horizon too), it became apparent that some fixes were definitely needed. First and foremost was the stability. Even after applying the patch, our first attempt at multiplayer conquest was cut short when the co-op server we were hosting suddenly crashed – and took all of our character data with it, leaving our team back at the starting level with none of the gear we had acquired. Our eventual solution involved grabbing a laptop to run a dedicated server, and then zoning around at random to make sure our stats were saved constantly, but even then we still had some slight stability issues. This actually led to another interesting anomaly – at one point in the game, the combat-free town the player’s party is occupying is invaded, and they are forced into a series of scripted events to defend it. This is fun and all, but when my friend’s copy of the game suddenly started going unstable and he had to reconnect, he ended up presented with the “peaceful” version of the town instead of the version I was in – and what’s worse we had no way to get to each other either. A piece of scripting was dependent upon us being in the same area to actually move on to the game’s next chapter after finishing this party, so we eventually had to just close the entire server down and manually restart from the next chapter. There were also cases where we were just randomly de-synchronized from each other, and I’d see my friend running into a wall while, on his screen, he was fending off an enemy attack several rooms away.

Sadly, minor technical glitches aren’t where the problems cease. Many of the skill sets seem to have minor bugs or glitches to them too. One example being my Dwarven “explosives” skill, which I badly wanted to bring up so that I could unlock some of the cooler higher-level skills. Unfortunately, even after loading myself down with enough tools of arson to make my fireball-wielding friend wary of being anywhere near me, and then expending all of it on one of the bosses, my experience bar for that skill hadn’t moved an inch – and refused to for the rest of our session, despite the use of explosives being the sole requirement of increasing this skill according to the description. The game also has something of a strange handling of loot management, in that the kind of loot you will get depends on the class you are playing. I guess it makes sense in some way, but I did need to spend a bit of extra time trying to figure out why my party never received any special-item loot that my own character could use in multiplayer, until we noticed it was because my crazed friend kept killing everything while I was constantly cowering in a corner waiting for my status bars to recharge (as part of my obsessive-compulsive “everything must be topped off” behavior).

I’d also like to place a final complaint on the interface too. Normally I’m very flexible in terms of how UI elements are handled (so long as they work), but MK: Apocalypse consistently found ways to annoy me. One outstanding example being inventory management, as due to limited inventory space (another debate I won’t go into here) it’s very common that a packrat like me would run back to town to offload, either to vendors or into a universal storage box – but having to individually drag over each item in my inventory got tedious, fast. The game also offers a lot of cool options for combing “Mage Stones” together to enhance weapons and armor, but the interface for doing this is also unnecessarily clunky. The game encourages players to experiment with different combinations, but after adding a stone to the preparation window, there’s no way to remove it again or replace it without hitting “Cancel” and taking out everything else you’ve inserted too. Little problems like this drag down the experience unnecessarily, and really should have been addressed before the game was shipped. I’ve also heard a lot of complaints on the camera control and player movement, but I felt it was pretty passable and worked especially well if I took advantage of the WASD buttons to handle movement, and the mouse for camera manipulation – the only other irritation I can proclaim would be that there are too few quick slots to comfortably accommodate the number of skills and spells in the game.

I really don’t want to rag on MK: Apocalypse completely however, because the length is quite satisfactory, the inclusion of co-op play is a very good bonus, and I just found this to be a really fun RPG romp all around – which, ultimately, is the most important thing. Graphically the game also puts forth a very aesthetically-pleasing presentation (this also ties into the cutscenes), and if it wasn’t for the stability problems (as well as sometimes very-inconsistent framerates) I’d be all the more happy with it. I’ll heartily recommend Mage Knight: Apocalypse to any RPG fan who wants something just a little different out of their hack-n-slash experience – or just wants to play a bad-ass Dwarf who sweeps the landscape clean with miniguns and incendiary grenades – but before picking it up, make sure you have a fairly beefy system, and also check to see if any new patches have been released to curtail some of the major design flaws - this should then ensure you can extract maximum enjoyment.