In case you didn’t follow the development, release, and expansion of Din’s Curse on GameBanshee over the past year or so, it’s an action role-playing game that was released independently by Soldak Entertainment in March of last year. A couple of months ago, Soldak also released the Demon War expansion pack, adding new enemies, quests, and generally more things to do while playing the game, so this review is for the two titles combined.
The premise behind Din’s Curse is that you behaved badly during your first life on the planet, and so the god Din has cursed you to return and redeem yourself during your second go-around. To do that, you have to travel to a number of towns and complete enough quests to save them. Each town is basically a mini-Diablo, with NPC shopkeepers and quest-givers on the surface, and monsters and loot in the multi-level dungeon underground.
Each town is randomly generated when you visit it. That means you never know what sorts of monsters you’re going to face, or what kinds of quests you’re going to receive. Nicely, Soldak gives you lots of options for creating the towns. You can specify the starting level of the monsters, the size of the dungeon, the pace of the game, and more. The difficulty is important, because monsters can visit the surface and attack the town, and if too many NPCs get killed, then you fail the current town and have to move on to the next.
Character creation is straightforward. Din’s Curse comes with six base classes, each with three skill trees. These classes are fairly standard, and include the likes of warriors, rogues and priests, but you can also create “hybrid” classes by picking any two of the skill trees from the base classes. That means Din’s Curse has 141 different class combinations for you to try out. Meanwhile, the Demon War expansion pack adds in the demon hunter base class, and so it has 196 combinations available. Besides the classes, there are also numerous difficulty options that you can select for each character, including “hardcore” (you only die once), “unlucky” (you find fewer magic items), and “lost” (you don’t get to use a map). So Din’s Curse gives you way more options for creating characters than you’ll probably ever need, which is a good thing.
Each character is defined by a collection of attributes and skills. The attributes include things like strength, dexterity and intelligence, which do about what you’d expect, and each skill tree contains 10 skills. Interestingly, none of the skills have prerequisites, but some are more expensive than others. For example, in the warrior’s “defender” tree, the shield bash skill only costs one point for its first rank, while the plate mail skill costs 15. Each time characters level up, they gain five points to spend on their attributes and an increasing number of points to spend on skills (starting with 2 skill points at level 2 and growing to 8 by level 30), so that eventually they can afford the expensive skills. I played my a warrior to level 30 in the game, and I never even came close to maxing him out.
The actual gameplay in
Din’s Curse is a little less exciting. You face a motley collection of monsters that do a variety of things (including bugs that burrow out of the floor, and blobs that break apart into smaller blobs), and you find equipment with lots of different qualities and bonuses, but those are basically the minimum requirement for an action RPG, and nothing in the combat engine makes
Din’s Curse stand out. Plus, the game is pretty repetitive. There isn’t anything in the way of a story, or landmarks, or memorable characters, and enemies are tuned to your level, so the game is all about grinding just for grinding’s sake.
The quests also leave me wanting a bit more. On the plus side, they’re all in real-time, so if you’re alerted that some townspeople are starving, then they won’t just wait patiently for you to show up. If you take too long then they might die or leave, and you’ll have fewer NPCs in your town. Similarly, the longer you take to save a town the more powerful the bosses in the dungeon become, and the more machines of war they make (including anti-magic devices, which spawn random anti-magic zones for you to dodge). But on the down side, the quests are pretty trivial. Almost every one uses the format “Go to level X and kill Y or destroy Z or find A copies of B,” and you just repeat them over and over again. Demon War helps with this a little, but it doesn’t take long to see each quest multiple times.
Finally, Din’s Curse is severely lacking in bells and whistles. For sound, there is almost no voice acting, and all of the sound effects make it sound like you’re fighting somebody in plate mail — with all of the requisite bangs and clangs — even though most of the enemies are fleshy creatures. For the graphics, the game is definitely sub-par. Your character models all of the weapons and armor you find (which isn’t always good, like when my warrior had to wear ugly purple boots for a few levels), and there is variety to the appearance of the monsters, but the spell effects are a disaster (among other things, big explosions are just a collection of little explosions, none of which look good, and grenades look like little sparkles of light), and the overall appearance is retro at best. Din’s Curse might have looked appealing about ten years ago. Maybe. Since even budget action RPGs usually have a lot of polish these days, the rough edges to Din’s Curse (including a typo-filled text file pretending to be a manual) make it stand out in a bad way.
And so, whether or not Din’s Curse is right for you depends on what you want to see in an action RPG. If you just want monsters to kill and equipment to loot, then Din’s Curse is fine, and it gives you all sorts of options for how to play. But if you want a story, or at least a reason for killing the big bad boss at the bottom of the dungeon, then Din’s Curse isn’t just a little bit lacking, it’s completely lacking.
If you’ve read a lot of my reviews, then you might know that my least favorite type of campaign is one where you’re expected to complete a bunch of loosely- or unrelated side quests (such as in Dragon Age II). But Din’s Curse is even a step down from that, and so I didn’t particularly enjoy the 20+ hours I spent with it. To me, with each town simply leading to the next, and no end in sight, playing Din’s Curse felt a lot like treading water, and I prefer to play games where I actually make some progress. But if your desires are different, then Din’s Curse might work out for you, especially if you only have a limited amount of time for playing games, because Din’s Curse has simple mechanics, and it’s easy to jump into and out of.
