Publisher: DreamCatcher
Publisher 2: Dusk2Dawn
Developer: Mayhem Studios
Category: Role-Playing
Release Dates
Intl - 02/24/2005
N Amer - 10/02/2006
Neverend Review
Share
Digg This
Glink It
As the character Agavaen, you and your group of
merry thieves enjoy a hearty night of drinking and whooping it up after the
successful theft of a treasure chest full of gold. But there is no honor
among thieves as two of the band decide to make off with the loot in the
middle of the night. Since this is a male dominated profession, the leader of
the thieves instantly blames Agavaen and her wily female ways, and draws his
blade to kill her, but instead Agavaen kills him instead, setting off an
adventure the likes I have never seen started before. The quest to find your
stolen gold that you had stolen first!
OK, that may be waffling it a bit, there is some
other stuff in the game that may be more enticing to some players, but for me
the beginning of the game was as surprising as it was original, and that is a
good thing. With society's fascination with the anti-hero it was kind of
cool to see a game where the main character was not only a woman (going
against typecast) but a mean one at that. No noble prodding along, no horrific
wrong that needs to be righted, yes, were deep into Pulp Fiction territory
here. Unfortunately that is where anything positive about this game ends,
exactly four minutes into the game, we have hit our peak and things only go
down from here, way down.
"Proving once again that the videogame is a male dominated past time.
For starters, there is no real learning curve in
the game, after your initial battle with the bandit leader, you can go off
roaming in the nearby woods (which is viewed from a sort of archaic top-down
view) and run into any number of different baddies, all of whom are waaaayyyy
more powerful then you. In other games of this genre, you will do battle with
creatures that are either:
A) Half your hit points and one tenth your
attacking ability.
or
B) A pack of dog sized rats that will miss
you nine times out of ten when attacking and will die with one swipe of your
dagger.
In either case, these types of battles are there
to begin boosting your characters level, thereby increasing the attack ability
and hit points (and a bunch of other stuff). You know, the gold standard in
which all role playing games move forward so as to keep things fun and
exciting. But no, not in Neverend, nope the first creatures you will probably
meet are skeletons that will proceed to chop you up within two turns, and you
will barely scratch them. It's a frustrating and head scratching scenario all
at the same time. This strange and befuddling gameplay not only works with the
uneven battles that you face but with actual combat itself. Relying on a
aged combat system, players pick what they would like to do (attack, cast
spell, etc) during the turn based combat, when the selection is made, then a
bar style timer begins shrinking on the right side of the screen (each
participant in the battle has a timer), when the bar ends, the action then
begins. It's a pretty remedial form of turn based combat and I could swear I
played games like this on my Sega Saturn more then 11 years ago (Mystaria, I
believe). Of course, as you level up then the bar times down faster and you
may eventually be able to get in more then one attack in the time it takes an
opponent to get off a single attack (it actually happens pretty quickly, but
since you still can't kill your opponent, what's the point in semantics).
This is of course only in theory as even after logging entirely too many hours
on this game, I do not feel that I am anywhere near where I would be had this
been a more traditional RPG, after all, I have died more times then I care to
admit and I'm a professional!
"If I had a hammer... I'd hammer in the morning... I'd hammer in the
evening..."
At this point, I will tell you that it has been a
really long time, and I mean a really long time since I heard in game audio
and music that was as flavorless as this AND seemed to make no sense. Case in
point, when battling, the screen changes from the top down view to a 3/4 view
kind of perspective and when it does, the out-of-place background noise (more
on this in a sec) disappears and this weird electronifunka comes on in all its
predictable and "trying to be all serious" tone, and I mean this in the very
worst way. The aforementioned background noise seems like something out of a
classic Disney cartoon, Bambi or possibly The Fox and the Hound, with birds
chirping and the all the wrong effects for a game that has you battling
creatures hell-bent on killing you. And don't get me started on the voice
acting, holy wasabi! This is played for laughs and the developers didn't mean
for it to be done this way. It doesn't have the correct timing, verbiage
doesn't flow the way anyone, heck anything would communicate, whew. And the
chanting, who brought the chanting to the table?
The graphics are also a joke at best, I know that
there was a team of developers that probably worked way too hard on this and
many nights of no sleep were forced down on them, but I am sorry, the graphics
in the game are remedial at best. This is graphics that are dated to the late
90's and that's seven years ago. The character models are clearly unrefined as
you can see that the character rendering ended at "looks like a person". And
that combat view switch I talked about before, constantly switches each time
an attack is conducted. It's as if the programmers thought if they kept
switching camera angles we might not catch on to the poor movement and attack
visuals. The environments also seem to be lacking that strange thing I like
to call consistency. Case in point, when walking through the poorly detailed
forest, I noticed that the ground would change from green to grey, as if I
were now walking on concrete, however, when a battle would commence and that
nifty (sarcasm) camera change would occur, there I'd be, back on the green
forest floor, nary a patch of grey in sight readying to get my butt handed to
me.
I could go on, I really could, but the game
unfortunately is just not worth it.
| Review Scoring Details for Neverend |
Gameplay: 5.0
This is RPG 101 for 2nd graders, the point and
click interface makes you feel dumb, the movement when roaming the world just
doesn't fit.
Graphics: 4.7
Very last century here, the only upside is that
the game loads very quickly.
Sound: 4.0
It's funny, but that's sad because it's funny
unintentionally. Poor voice work with sound effects placed in the wrong game.
Difficulty: Hard
Hard because you start off with some really wimpy
weapons and then are expected to do battle against foes that are many times
your superior. That includes the fairies you run across.
Concept: 6.0
The game's only redeeming quality, a game where
nobody appears to be good and your mission stems from someone stealing gold
from you that you stole in the first place. Could have been a real treat.
Overall: 4.8
Easily the worst game I have played all year.
