Q: What do you get if you dumb-down Lara Croft's moves, trade her 12-Gauge for a knife and stuck her in a tunnel full of evil elves who run amok because of a magically induced solar eclipse?

A: Dark Vengeance, from MacSoft.

This is not to say Dark Vengeance is a bad game. Quite the contrary is true. It offers stunning graphics (perhaps even better than the Tomb Raider series) and excellent lighting effects, very nice, dark mood-setting music, and some very innovative enemies and puzzles.

Dark Vengeance

features three somewhat cliche characters: Nanoc the Gladiator (standard warrior type), Jetrel the Warlock (a magic-user) and Kite, the Trickster (your common thief). Each has their own "dark" reason for their vengeance against the evil elves. Your job is to bring it to them.

Growing up as a kid, one of my favorite things to do was watch cartoons on a Saturday morning. And one of my favorite cartoons was the Daffy Duck cartoon where Daffy tries to convince Porky Pig that he's Robin Hood. Standing on a log over a river with his bow, Daffy tries to demonstrate his combat prowess: "Ho! Ha! Spin! Perry! Dodge! Thrust!," then *SMACK!*–the bow ends up bending Daffy's bill back in the wrong direction.

Combat in Dark Vengeance is very much like that same Daffy Duck cartoon–until you know what you're doing. That's due to Dark Vengeance's somewhat complicated keyboarding, a technique known as chording. Chording requires you to hold down one key and then press another at the same time. For instance, if you hold down the attack key (control is the default) and then press your right arrow, you would do a "powerful" attack. Fortunately, if you do not like the combat system, MacSoft was gracious enough to allow you to assign single keys to chord combos.

Dark Vengeance's combat is also very diverse. Your character can have up to 9 different weapons, each with its own special damage and unique abilities. For these techniques, the player is required to pick up rune stones, which are scattered around the dungeons. For each weapon your character has, there are three different types of attack: a quick attack which does less damage; a forward attack which a Dark Vengeanceances your character ahead; and a slower, more powerful attack. Weapons have dramatic special effects, leaving light trails in the air following their wake.




The third person viewpoint makes combat awkward in that your character sometimes blocks your view of your enemies. It seems as though the game's designers realized this could happen, so they did one thing that was really helpful: by holding down on your attack key, your character will target an enemy, upon which a glowing red diamond will appear. As your character gets a lock, the diamond will turn from bright red to bright green, and your character will continually update its attacks on its target. Another thing which helps is setting the camera farther back, which you can do on the fly. The only drawback to this is the camera returns to its default if you die or open a saved game.

Enemies range from the easily dispatched, such as

Dark Elf Grunts & Sergeants, to the more difficult, like the lumbering Undead Knight, to the downright impossible, like the Fire Drake and Dark Elf Beret. The award for the coolest enemy has to go hands down to the Stained Glass Knight, which are animated, 2D pieces of glass in a 3D world.

In spite of Dark Vengeance's excellent graphics, the game is not without its shortcomings. As noted, the chording attacks are somewhat cumbersome, but that's not all. Since your melee attacks take such a long time to coordinate, if you press an attack key several times, your character can be stuck attacking long after there are no enemies present. The most peculiar thing happens when you die, restart your game, and your character is still swinging from the combat sequence you started before you died. Also, your characters should avoid water, since they oddly can't swim.

Dark Vengeance also showed some odd behaviors. Sometimes, I was able to jump on top of an enemy, standing on their shoulders while they tried to attack me. One other time, I had a Stained Glass Knight fall on my head, staying there as he tried to attack me. Yet on another occasion, while playing Kite the Trickster, my character got stuck in a barrel, somehow managing to violate one of the basic rules of the universe. She also got stuck in a statue. And a wall. Occasionally, you would get caught up on a wall, even though you didn't seem to actually be touching the wall.

While most of the games puzzles consist merely of running through tunnels, looking for keys or special objects which will cause ancient machines to operate, there were others for which I have no idea how I solved them. Somehow, I did something which changed which doors would open, but I can't quite figure out exactly what.

For a game entitled "Dark Vengeance," narration seems to take quite a tongue-in-cheek approach. The intro for Nanoc is cheesy, "and he killed (3 second pause) a whole (2 second pause) bunch of elves." It sounded like a the narrator was stopping

to take a sip of his tea. Jetrel's is even worse: "Whose Thine Daddy?" asks the game. (I wonder what Bobby Knight would think?) Then there's the bell-tower level, where when you finish the narrator says, "Let's blow this popsicle stand." These lines, which could potentially have been funny in another game, seem only to diminish from Dark Vengeance's otherwise well presented aura of darkness.

Bottom Line

Despite Dark Vengeance's shortcomings, I really liked this game. It was fun to play once you got the hang of the chording. There were many nice rendered cut scenes when the character completed certain tasks, and the graphics and sound were awesome. For around $40, Dark Vengeance will give you several hours of entertainment. It should be well worth the investment. Bravo to MacSoft for bringing Reality Bytes' Dark Vengeance to the Mac!

Pros:
Beautiful graphics and lighting effects, great mood-setting music, interesting story line and hours of challenging gameplay.

Cons:
Chording very difficult at beginning, characters sometimes get "stuck" in other objects, slight cheese factor.

Score: 7.5 on a scale of 1 to 10.

Mac System Requirements:
System 7.6.1 or greater
180 MHz PowerPC 603e or 132 MHz PowerPC 604 Processor
32 MB RAM
256 color (3D video accelerator card with at least 4MB VRam and QD3D/Rave v 1.5 drivers recommended)
Network & Internet play (For Multi-Player)

Konfigurationer