Mage Knight: Apocalypse

The Good
The graphics are really nice. I ran it on a GeForce 6600, and had to turn down most settings. Even then, the game looked great, especially when I zoomed in. That's a another nice thing about the game: you can zoom in/out via the mouse wheel. If you zoom in as far as the game lets you, you can essentially play this game from a 3rd-person view, from behind your character, like Max Payne. I also liked the fact that you could use the WASD keys to control your character. This is especially nice, since it allows you to use the mouse solely for attacking or obtaining items.

The Bad
First off: I hated installing the game. It's on 6 CDs, and was quite a behemoth of an installation. It just took -so- long; and I had to be there for it, since I had to swap CDs. I'm pretty patient, but this just seemed longer. They should have just had the installation program copy over archives from all CDs, and -then- uncompress everything.

Secondly, my biggest beef with this game is: after playing for a bit, I found myself thinking "Meh..." That is, there's nothing new here. Everything has been done before; it's just another Diablo 2 clone, without the super nice CGs, and with terrible voice acting. The writing isn't flattering either. Your saving the world, which is called The Land. What? The Land? If it was more humorous, that would work, but as is, it just felt like they didn't even bother to think of a name for the proverbial "world in danger".

Finally, it may just be me, but the interface icons felt like they were tiny. And I was playing in 800x600 resolution, so that shouldn't have been the case. But as it was I sometimes had difficulty discerning what the heck I was looking at / moving around in my inventory, until the game told me what it was. Oh...that's a mace, not some silver-colored thing.

The Bottom Line
Another Diablo 2 clone with nice graphics, good controls, and mediocre gameplay. I liked it well enough, especially since it's price was marked down to $10. But then again, I guess that says something about the game in itself.