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The best Action/RPG this year!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 27 / 30
Date: September 06, 1999
Author: Amazon User

Darkstone is the best Action/RPG of 1999. The 3D graphics are absolutely great (Direct3D or compatible 3D accelerator card required), and the 3D special effects are stunning. The player interface is smooth and easy. You have full control of camera angle in 360 degrees.

As you start to play Darkstone, you will have to complete a number of quests. You will have to find several crystals to form the Time Orb which will allow you to defeat the evil dragon Draak. The save/load feature is neat. By selecting a saved game, it shows you exactly where you were when you saved the game, so you can differentiate between different saved games.

In Darkstone, to your advantage, you will have two characters to use. Each one you can command separately, or you can command one and have the other commanded by the computer. Its great to have one character able to resurrect the other if need be.

Darkstone is a very fun game to play. There is a random quest generator which ensures you don't play the same game twice. The storyline is challenging enough so that you will want to play over and over. I highly recommend this wonderful game.

This game is totally addictive - I highly recommend it

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 13 / 15
Date: November 16, 1999
Author: Amazon User

If you're a fan of Diablo, you will love Darkstone. It takes the great interface of Diablo and adds great new features (like a bank), lots of quests that can be intellectually stimulating, and interesting levels, creatures, as well as beautiful graphics. It's very replayable, and the new patch from Gathering of Developers has a hero level, which is harder than the three difficulty levels the game comes with. I'm definitely enjoying this game while waiting for Diablo II to come out.

Fair game, for a diablo clone. Gets dull VERY quickly

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 12 / 15
Date: December 15, 1999
Author: Amazon User

If you've played Diablo through to the end so many times you begin to see the spiked monstrosity in your dreams, and STILL can't get enough - but really wish it could make use of your new 3D accelerator, this is the game for you! On the other hand, it's far more likely you'll play Darkstone for a few evenings, uninstall the game and begin having a blast playing Frisbee with the disc.

-Buy this game because you enjoy playing games with no particular point, because the only skill you wish to employ is marathon mouse-clicking, because you just can't get enough pointless quests for useless objects, or because you are completely indifferent to storyline 'Just point the way to the next monster! '

-DON'T buy this game if you're looking for a challenging fantasy game with an immersive storyline, or if you're looking for something new and interesting that will earn itself a place of honor on your hard drive.

Don't get me wrong, I loved Diablo, though it shared many of these shortcomings, it had a distinctly 'real' atmosphere. You felt a certain amount of immersion despite lack of an involved storyline. Perhaps had Darkstone been released years ago with Diablo it would have been a different story. Darkstone strikes me as being 'dated', and perhaps incomplete. Did the developer ship it out before it was complete? Who knows.

If you purchase this title, be sure it's from a place with a forgiving return policy. Speaking of which, anyone want to buy a copy? It's in perfect condition, barely used...

A cool way to pass the time

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: October 18, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Usually I'm an adventure game fanatic at heart, but this game was bought for me as a gift and I found myself greatly caught up on it as soon as I installed it on my computer.

The game is very much a dungeon bash situation. You create a character and assign them attributes, buy them weapons, and then go out to the local dungeon and pound every monster you meet, bather up as much treasure as you can, and then buy better weapons so you can kill even more monsters.

While you're in town the villagers will tell you about items that have been stolen that you can find and return for rewards, or people who ask for your help in killing a particularly nasty monster, or they tell you a bit about the big creature you'll find yourself facing at the end of the game. Your ultimate goal will be to gather several crystals together to gain an item that will allow you to take on the evil dragon lord at the end of the game, but there's dozens of other quests to keep you occupied meanwhile.

One of the most innovative features to the game is that it maps each area and dungeon differently for every new game you start, plus it juggles the quests around so that no one game is exactly like another. It was an interesting detail that wasn't necessary, but was nice of the programmers to add.

All in all, I was quite pleased with this game. There's times when one gets bored with confusing puzzle games and you just want to run around in a dungeon and hack up monsters. Darkstone offers adventure by the bucketload, and will hold your attention for awhile.

A derivative of Diablo, with some original touches

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 5 / 5
Date: May 16, 2003
Author: Amazon User

System on which this was tried out: Pentium III 733 MHz, nVidia TNT 2 Pro, 128 MB RAM, Win98, with a monitor with 1024 x 768 resolution. Hardware acceleration is required.

In this review, I'll only consider Darkstone from the viewpoint of single-player. Darkstone is a fantasy action/adventure game, but along the lines of Diablo rather than Black Isle's AD&D-style Baldur's Gate. I consider Darkstone to be a Diablo derivative; Darkstone's release was after that of the original Diablo but long before that of Diablo II, so it has a different spin than that of Diablo II.

Graphics are much more cartoonlike than those of Diablo, but as a tradeoff the different kinds of monsters really *are* different, instead of just being a few basic types varying only by colour. Some of the monster types: skeletons with varying types of weapons and armour; giant insects (wasps, bees with electrical attacks); bats; rats; snakes; lizardmen; nosferatu/vampires; ratmen (cute, actually) of varying strengths and armament. Very occasionally a dungeon chamber will be full of vicious little chickens. :)

Quests come in two flavors, and each game has a different, random quest mix.
1) A minor quest consists of a townsperson walking up to the player and naming the item to be located (in an appropriate spiel). The quest-assigner exchanges a lump sum in gold for the item.
2) A major quest, on the other hand, has a plot and even a puzzle to solve, and ends with the award of one of the 7 crystals to the player.

Darkstone's graphics have less atmosphere than those of Diablo, but there are a greater variety of enemies and settings, and the player has more freedom to enter higher-level dungeons - of course, after that, it's the player's own fault if he/she is creamed for tackling high-level enemies before the character can cope with them. (On the flip side, the save mechanism allows multiple save files, unlike Diablo, and there's no penalty for dying, something Diablo II adjusted.)

Similar concepts to Diablo: health and mana potions and fountains; magic door spells that gate back to town; monsters can't follow you into town or between levels, and don't respawn once you've cleaned out an area (something Diablo II adjusted); ability to range the countryside rather than just having a dungeon crawl (something Diablo II also picked up); random quest mix (something Diablo II dropped, unfortunately), where the major quests have more eye candy and more mental challenges than Diablo's, at least on the first visit; characters have active and passive skills, something Diablo II also picked up; randomized dungeons, except for the set-piece areas specific to major quests.

Extra concepts: The character must eat and rest, but can pay for lessons in skills as well as practicing on the town training ground. While town is a safe zone, the player can pickpocket town characters - including stealing eggs from a chicken. Items and attacks have a more complex, Diablo II-ish flavor, including poison spells and cursed artifacts - things that can be fixed, for a price. The blacksmith can upgrade as well as repair, buy, and sell weapons. The town usurer is a good idea. Incidentally, as in Diablo II, the player may have a sidekick, but unlike D2, the player can fully control either player character at will.

As for the dungeons themselves, they're more elaborate than those of Diablo, or than several of those in Diablo II - not graphically, but in terms of content: pressure plates to open some doors, teleport pads, doors that open only when switches are thrown in specific sequences. Outside individual dungeons, the map can be used to direct the player character to a specific location.

Some poor play balance aspects: the player will amass HUGE amounts of money, and the usurer doesn't even charge a fee; AIs can't open doors, and hold still once a door closes between you and them, which leaves them at the mercy of a ranged attack.

Annoyances: voice acting ranges from OK to rotten; player can replay *everything* said by any NPC more than 'good morning', but can't sift out just the quests left open; those must be tracked on the player's own time. Consequently, for a game that's been underway for a while, the playback feature on NPC conversation isn't useful.

Darkstone, aka Diablo 1.5

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 7 / 9
Date: February 15, 2000
Author: Amazon User

When Blizzard released its mega-hit Action/RPG hybrid Diablo in 1996, it was gobbled up with enthusiastic acclaim from critic and gamer alike, with good reason. It evolved the addictive dungeon-crawling formula from Gauntlet with gloomy, gothic architecture to create one of the most satisfying romps to straddle both sides of the Action/RPG fence in years, and shared distinction with Daggerfall in bringing CRPGing out of its regressive slump in the last few years. After the initial deluge, it's odd that most other gaming companies out there were slow to carpe diem with their own bandwagon products, given their the propensity to create "me-too" games if it follows a successful formula. So, this sensory input sluggishly trudged through the nervous system of the gaming industry until finally, in late 1999, it hit the brains of the rival CEOs, and out marched the clones. Darkstone lead the pack with Revenant and Nox soon to follow. It's a good thing that the most derivative of the three, Darkstone, was released first, because come this summer when Diablo II will be released (uh, so the grapevine says), this franchise will definitely be damaged goods.

Darkstone is SO derivative, down to the color of the potions, names of equipment, character classes, stats, and mouse controls, that if I'd been handed this game without documentation on a nondescript CD I'd have thought it was "Diablo 3D." I challenge you to find a reviewer who DOESN'T make a Diablo allusion with this game. Even developer DSI is self-conscious about this, its very manual instructing gamers at the beginning that if they "are already familiar with this type of game," an obvious reference to Diablo, they can move on to appendixes outlining the major differences in structure from its predecessor. Even banner advertisements for Darkstone that I was privy too touted "All you former Diablo players searching for a new home, your search is over." There is something refreshing about a gaming company that admits that its product is nothing more than a stylistic rip-off.

The best way to review Darkstone would be to speak about how it in fact DIFFERS from Diablo. First off, in single-player mode you have the option of playing simultaneously with two characters, with the computer controlling one. This teamwork makes progress easier, and AI used is decent enough with a Warrior or Thief. In Town (yes, that's its name, "Town," DSI must have rightly assumed that naming it would be redundant, after all, one of the most oft typed phrases I saw on Diablo's Battle.Net was "see u in town"), in addiction to the mandatory blacksmith/witch/healer/innkeeper present there was also a banker for hoarding all that extra loot taking up space in your inventory, and anything that you purchase that exceeds what's in your pocket is extracted from your account (medieval debiting! How progressive!). There is also a Skills Trainer, who trains you in, well, skills, and various tiers of ability, that operate much the same way as spells except they don't tax your stats any. Some skills passively assist your character, such as "Trade" and "Perception" which endow your hero with the ability to haggle merchant prices and detect trapped objects, other skills like "Forester" or "Theft" have to be activated. The well-disciplined and learned character is a huge advantage on the road; I got in the habit or regularly using "Concentration," "Meditation," "Orientation," "Prayer," and "Lycanthropy" in-play, which was a huge boon to my combat skills, as well as using others such as "Repair" and "Recharging" to increase the value of surplus equipment I'd find before pawning off. There is also a feature to allow you to automatically backtrack previously visited areas, allowing the computer to take care of a lot of needless traveling to and fro in dungeons and on the surface world. There are a couple of irksome contributions unique in Darkstone's re-treading of old ground, however. One is the inclusion of hunger and aging of your characters, giving the game a condensed timeframe feel to it, but to what end? A tad of grounding realism to your careers as evil-smiting heroes? Luckily, there is usually enough food and anti-aging potions down the road. Two, prices tend to be extraordinarily inflated compared to Diablo, at rates 200-400% of what you'd expect. 10,000 gold just ain't what it used to be, pardner. And naturally, Darkstone's engine, bestiary, quests, and dungeon-design have been re-modeled and expanded from Diablo's, with 32 dungeons to Diablo's 16, and a plethora of randomized quests to go with them, even if they mainly fall in the banality of retrieving the of or killing the of ages.

I enjoyed digging up the nostalgia of Diablo's glory days in Darkstone, and played it nightly with a friend of mine for about a month before the novelty wore off. However, that's still only a third of the time I devoted to Diablo. Simply put, Diablo was a little more fun that Darkstone. Diablo had the feel of a melancholy AD&D Ravenloft adventure, Darkstone was more along the line of a clichéd D&D dungeon-crawl. Diablo's Trinsic was a morose and haunted country village bathed in crepuscular dusk, Darkstone's garden-variety "Town" is a fort enclosing a pen of adventurer shops in bright daylight. Diablo had a thematically consistent ensemble of demons and undead, Darkstone has a goofy collage of goblinoids, anti-heroes, and creepy-crawlies---you thought Monty Python's killer rabbit was a joke? Meet its rodent cousin. Even Darkstone's musical score sounds like a banal remake of Diablo's. Drak even makes a bona fide Evil Speech (tm) at the end of the last level before commencing battle.

Darkstone is a very serviceable modern upgrade to Diablo, with some welcome additions to the award-winning formula. It's worth looking into if you're a starved Action/RPG fan or if you want to relive some of that late-night hack-and-slashing with some friends. Just entertain no illusions about what it is, and what it isn't.

Tiding me over till Diablo II

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: February 09, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Not perfect by any means, but it has addicted me. Graphics are OK. Voice-overs are not the kind Blizzard has made us come to expect. Not the best story. But I am enjoying it- and for thirty bucks that says a lot.

True, they also won't win any points for originality... all though there are a number of game play innovations that I hope the staff at Diablo II won't ignore(upgrading weapons, skills, better mapping, running, and that feature that autopilots you to certain places you've been before). Single player was fun- featuring the ability to use two characters, but as with almost games I play nowadays- multiplayer is what I care about. And with two good friends- We had quite a blast romping through the dungeons at Heat.net, all though its difficult to get a game going there as it hasn't achieved a high level of popularity. What made it even better was that the three of us were using Roger Wilco to communicate. It felt like we were in our High school Dungeons and Dragons days even though we were in different states.

Well until Diablo II comes out (as many have said) you could do a lot worse than this game.

Good game with some flaws

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: December 02, 1999
Author: Amazon User

Darkstone is indeed a fine RPG game. Sadly, it was released with numerous bugs, only some of which are corrected by the game patch.

I share most of the opinions of those who have extolled it virtues, and shall not repeat them. Instead I wish to point out two of the game's most irksome shortcomings.

While it is nice to have the second character there to resurrect you, I have found that character #2 is much more proficient at getting himself killed. The AI controlling #2's actions is not the best. I recommend using #2 for his native skills and as a pack animal only.

Also, the default graphical cursor is slow and laggy, making melee with a dozen or so critters very difficult. The game comes with the option of switching to a hardware-controlled cursor, but this option does not work with all video cards.

In spite of all that, I have played through Darkstone many times already. The most fun I've had is picking the pockets of the dungeon creatures with my thief.

(Diablo +3D) - 99% fun = Darkstone

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 7 / 10
Date: February 03, 2000
Author: Amazon User

1 1/2 Stars. I bought this after reading PC Gamer's review that gave it a 90% and Editor's Choice award. After playing the game for several days, I went back to the review and saw that the reviewer was the magazine's wargames specialist, who probably never played Diablo and unfortunately has no good concept of how an action/RPG should play.

This game is a tremendous disappointment. While it does contain 3D graphics, the modern 1999 display is actually inferior to the 2D 1996 game that inspired it. The display in Diablo is much easier to see and actually has a better, scarier atmosphere than Darkstone.

The 3D effects in this game would be ok, but for an huge problem, which is that you lose your preset front-forward camera angle any time you change directions. The character ends up going sideways and the perspective is lousy and difficult to follow. I understand that Tomb Raider 2 had this same problem with the camera angles. In any event, it is so distracting that it takes much of the fun out of the game. Ditto with the label on your character - when scanning for treasure near your character after a fight with the cursor, it pulls up a little note with your character's name on it, which is very annoying and makes it much harder to find loot.

The puzzles in this game are boring and the distance between receiving the clue and reaching a point in the game where you can actually solve the quest is far too long - often several different levels in the game.

Diablo had atomosphere and was creepy; when stalkers suddenly appeared and attacked, I jumped. I cringed when the horned demons made a run at me. By contrast, there is little suspense in this game. Most of the early levels feature endless rat killing, which gets old quickly. By attempting to be realistic with the lighting, the display is harder to focus on; think permanent cursed Cap of Night: -75% light radius.

Magic is trickier to use and less intuitive than in Diablo. Although I was focusing on archery more than anything else, I never could figure out precisely how to cast spells, based on the poor instructions in the manual. Although Darkstone allows for acquiring a broad range of skills, rather than just the one assigned to each character class in Diablo, most of the skills are neither interesting nor particularly useful.

Magic items and loot are less interesting than in Diablo and are much more expensive. It takes a long while to be able to acquire enough gold to buy anything useful or powerful (which I never really did, as I got too bored with the game to stick with it long enough to acquire a Big Weapon).

All in all, if you have Diablo, you will have more fun replaying it for the umpteenth time than trying to deal with this lousy clone, while waiting for Diablo II to arrive in February or June or October or Christmas 2001 or whenever. If you do not have Diablo, buy it - it is truly the most fun game ever made and despite the aging technology, is superior to this game in every way.

A lot of fun for the low price

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: August 07, 2001
Author: Amazon User

One might see this game as a Diablo clone, and it very well may be, but it is deeper and more fun than the original Diablo in many ways. First of all, the graphics are all 3D, which is a step that even Diablo 2 has not taken. The quests are a little more random and non-linear than in either Diablo, making it very replayable. One great feature is the way one player can create two heroes - one to control directly, and the other to be controlled by the computer as a monster-killing ally. In addition to this, the 3D levels have great lighting effects and fighting monsters is really fun.

There are 4 main classes, which are divided into 8 subclasses according to gender, which has a small effect on the characters (for example, females can be archers but males can be assassins). There are 8 skills that each character can learn and improve upon, and these skills are different for different classes. Also, characters get hungry and must be fed, with food bought from the store, found during adventuring, or found using special skills.

I bought the game for $ and was satisfied. I highly reccommend it for the new Amazon.com price or if you can find it at a PC game store for cheaper.

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