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One thing I'm sure we're all guilty of is playing a few games that we looked at as lackluster, unpolished, unfinished, buggy, glitchy, bad, or all of the above. In this first edition of Why Did I Play This? I, SirPsycho, take a look back at a steaming pile of gong that I got when I purchased what is perhaps my all time favorite game. All I wanted to buy was Planescape: Torment, and I found it for a good price coupled with a little game called Soulbringer, and I decided to install it on my old PC and give it a try. By the gods does the latter game reek of the bad decisions that rocked and eventually toppled the publisher Interplay.
Now there are many things that can anger the typical gamer, even if he/she considers or is known to be a hardcore, especially for the RPG scene. Now on the surface and even underneath it Soulbringer appears to be a normal RPG, you get thrust into a mystical world ripe with strife, ne'er-do-wells, conspiracy, and magic. However, the way the game is presented and played show a struggle of how you trudge through it just leaves much to be desired. For example; even before you get in your first fight you notice the first big design mistake the game made, that is that you cannot see anything more than ten feet away from your character!
Why? Is there a perpetual black haze around every character on that world? With that shot you also get a look at the combat system and how severely outdated it is for a game that was released in 2000, even the graphics look bad compared to most that was out at that time! Why do I have to click on the attack I wish to do in the 21st Century? This was not before the advent of hotkeys or even mouse based combat, so why did it need to be done for this game? Too many questions and not a single answer that would make any logical sense.
The plot is as cookie cutter as you can get for an RPG plot. You would think with the brilliance and success of Black Isle's desire to break the mold that had been cast over the stale RPG genre, that Interplay would try and be a bit pickier about what it decides to green light and publish. But no, this game can literally be summed up as:
*Spoilers*
"Evil magicians are summoning demons and taking over the world! Kill them all!"
/*spoilers*
The camera is so clunky and unfriendly that tweaking the angle during combat is useless as you'll miss out on valuable time to click on your attack and hope that your opponent does not use the perfect counter to send you down to feed the digital worms. The rest of the interface is no better, making navigation more of a chore than an easy way to quit out of the horrid game.
There are some pros to be had about this game. Despite the plot being so generic it hurts, it does trudge on to give any player that does enjoy the title a long, rewarding experience. There are hundreds of side quests to take to fill your wallet and get a better feel for the world of Rathenna, its inhabitants, and their culture. Combat has some depth to it in that you will have to switch weapons out on the fly to play to an enemy's physical weakness instead of there only being a magical weakness. The musical score is also above average, not by much though, and remember you could love it and think it a masterpiece of musical achievement or the perfect example of why this game sucks so hard.
In summary, if the game was release even five years before it was, it could have been considered a mindboggling masterpiece without peer. But since it was developed and came out during the time where Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Fallout, Torment, and others were trying to reinvent, reinvigorate, and renovate the old fashioned RPG house and succeeding, this game from the same publishing head starts backpedaling along all those steps forward. I cannot recommend this to anybody, if you are a completionist then by all means try and see what you can do with this, but do not play this alongside those aforementioned classics if you really wish to play Soulbringer. You'll just leave the crap to the flies and flock to the Sword Coast, you know you will.
Tune in next week for something completely different.
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