Silverfall is another game in the long line of Diablo-clones that fails to bring anything particularly thrilling to the table. If you haven’t had your fill of these types of games then there’s a lot to get excited about. But despite the spiffy graphics and art direction, you cannot avoid the feeling that you have been down this road before.
The biggest problem isn’t that the gameplay is a bit stale; it’s that the game lacks any real sense of charm. Wild Tangent’s FATE, a game that shamelessly copied the Diablo formula, was a lot of fun to play simply because it didn’t take itself too seriously – and only ran you around 20 bucks. Silverfall, despite a few neat tweaks, plays it by the numbers.
By now you know the drill: you control your hero, be it a human, elf, troll or goblin, via the keyboard and mouse and repeatedly click over and over and over again in order to kill waves of bad guys in order to get better and more expensive loot and to amass experience points to make your alter-ego stronger, faster, smarter, etc. so that he and she can kill tougher monsters in order to obtain even more expensive and powerful loot. You meet NPCs along the way that asks you for help in doing certain things, killing certain bad guys or finding certain objects. That’s pretty much it in a nutshell. If you have played any other game in this genre, you’ll feel right at home with Silverfall.
There are a few cool twists like the ability to partner up with various sidekicks who help you along the way. For example, early on in the game you may lend aid to a troll shaman who joins your group and either fights or sits back and heals you as you engage the enemy. You can issue these NPCs basic pre-fight commands such as “sit back and heal me” or “always engage” and they do a fairly good job of carrying out the orders. The other nice change of pace is the setting. It’s all very steampunk-ish with magic spells and the typical fantasy fare but there’s also a technological bent that gives it a dose of Arcanum.
Your hero in Silverfall is tailored to how you want it to be in the sense that you don’t pick a generic class, but rather your allocate skill points into various areas to mould the character into a pure mage, pure melee fighter, a ranged specialist or a hodge-podge of everything. It’s much easier to play the game with a character that at least has a rudimentary knowledge of spells as some of them are shockingly powerful; playing as a straight Troll fighter, on the other hand, is much more of a challenge, even with the hand to hand skills the game offers. There are a slew of skills and spells in the game and this offers nearly unlimited options – if you get can far enough in the campaign to get to the good stuff.
The first chunk of the game, revolving around saving a refugee camp, is long and extremely tedious as you race through marshlands and kill untold hundreds of skeletons, zombies, and ghouls. Most games throw all of the cool bits at the start to hook players into playing the game, but Silverfall does it backwards. If you can get past the first several hours, the game becomes much more enjoyable despite the relatively cheap design decision which allows the monsters in an area to level up right as you do – so you’re never really at an advantage when you gain power.
Another odd design decision is that the compass on the mini-map points in the direction that the camera is facing, rather than the player. This is terribly confusing because it goes against every other game in this genre. You get used to it after a while, but why in the world was it designed like this in the first place?
