There are five characters that the player can select from to act as their avatar in the journey through the Mage Knight universe. These characters are all pretty much clichés of clichés when it comes down to it. Each of the heroes you can choose from has a separate and individual tree of skills to investigate. As you progress through the game the players that you did not end up choosing will end up joining your party, so don't worry about missing out on their company if you have a hard time choosing (although you won't be able to directly control these extra party members). There is a scantily clad vampire assassin who specializes in necromancy, a Draconum mage, an Elvin Paladin, who is a master of the sword and healing, and a bearded dwarf who specialises in combat, both ranged and close quarters, as well as being into explosives. Most interesting of all the characters is the Amazon who, like a practitioner of kung-fu, has fighting styles that draw inspiration from a variety of animals, each with its own strength. Once selected, each character's visual appearance can be modified. It is unfortunate however, that there is little personalization that can occur beyond skin tone and haircut but it's better than being stuck with no choice at all.
Scantily clad women and buff dudes in armour. Pretty much par for the course of any RPG.
The graphics in Mage Knight are fairly decent. It contains some reasonably lush visuals, especially those that make up the many environments such as cities and sprawling jungles that you will battle your way through. The quality of the cutscenes does not seem to match that of the rest of the game however, and they often end up slightly oversimplified which seems odd when comparing them to the well put together imaginings of the Mage Knight world. Unfortunately, while the graphics range from being solid to impressive, there are several graphical and physics-related errors that appear during play and affect your experience. For example, it seems that either the archers in Mage Knight have homing arrows that can be projected through the most solid of objects, such as walls. It's incredibly frustrating to be fleeing from an enemy round a corner only to find that you’re still getting hit by adversaries who shouldn't even be able to see you.
For a title that centres on hack-and-slash gameplay, Mage Knight’s execution of this is incredibly flawed. Infact, to just go this far would be to understate its many shortcomings in terms of gameplay. The first thing you'll probably notice is that the camera is almost too infuriating to even discuss. Being a completely user-controlled viewing device, it requires constant readjustment. This is done by holding down the scroll wheel or space bar and moving the mouse around. This would be great if the game wasn’t based around action and battle, and instead was from its own newly created ‘looking at things’ genre. You can get some very good views and alternate angles of things by changing the viewing angle, however the problem with it in this game is that it needs to be changed constantly. When ploughing through hordes of Dark Dwarves and golems, the last thing you want to be doing is swinging your view around rather than your sword.
The creators of Mage Knight have chosen an odd save system to track your progress through the game. There are several large Crystals throughout the maps that act as both autosave and checkpoints. Unlike most other games in the genre, rather than requiring you to reload from your last save upon having your life taken, you, and your deceased party members, will instead be respawned at the last checkpoint with half your mana and health restored, along with all that you had just completed still remaining that way. In other words, any hitpoints that you have belted out of your enemies will still be gone, along with their friends that you have dispatched. We can only assume that this has been implemented to assuage some of the frustration that can be felt when traveling over the same territory time and time again. And whilst this problem may have been solved, its solution creates more issues than the initial challenge. This save system leads to battles feeling meaningless. What's the point of saving your health or playing strategically if you can just run in, swords swinging wildly, take off a few hit points only to die, come back and whittle away some more at your foe until he/she is dead. What's our motivation? We're not feeling it people!
Your quest takes you through some varied and impressive countryside.
The leveling up mechanic is fairly interesting and, instead of using a system that totals up overall experience points, the skills that you use the most get powered up as you go. This means that rather than you deciding what you want to focus on, the game interprets your style of play and boosts that. This is great for those that do not enjoy fussing around with the ever-confusing choices that some games give you, and you'll never find yourself deciding between adding a point to dexterity or endurance. This keeps it simple, though it does remove some of the control over your level ups. The result of this is it does make you conscious of using the skill you want to improve in rather than simply hacking away at enemies to get experience points to be used at random. Special skills are handled differently however, allowing you to decide what branch of specialty you want to pursue.
You will, as you progress through the game, be joined by the other characters you did not choose at the start of the game. These characters our out of your control however, and are instead directed by the game's AI. You'll soon be wishing that there was an option to turn this off however. These fellow adventurers can often be found standing around, presumably admiring the scenery whilst you do battle with the many enemies the game throws at you. When their not taking a breather, they're running off, headfirst into battle before you yourself have a chance to rest and regain your hit points. This leads the player to wish that instead of their companionship that these fellow party members would go and 'help' someone else. There is a multiplayer section of the game where you can play over the internet with friends. This adds an element of useful team gameplay, and you are able to play individual chapters of the game or the full thing depending on your tastes. We could not test this however as we had difficulty logging onto the servers, which doesn't bode well for online playability.
The suffering he predicts for your future is using the game's interface.
The menu system is another area that can become extremely frustrating, especially as you delve deeper into the game. Each menu pops up, and stays up, whilst action is still taking place, and each has its own window e.g. inventory spells etc. This can become painful, although it increases the 'real time' feeling of the Mage Knight world. Several ugly windows can be filling the screen and it makes for an extremely cluttered interface. Another contentious point is the inventory section. As you progress further into the game you will end up discovering many more items than you'll be able to carry. The issue here is of quantity but the quality. It seems that in the Mage Knight universe flowers take up as much space in one's backpack as does a full suit of armor. While this might be an anomaly that we had to put up with in older games during the PC's infancy, it should not be something that we are still encountering in the current world of RPGs.
Mage Knight: Apocalypse ends up being a terribly average, or even below-average, RPG. In a world filled with so many other titles of the same ilk, it's very difficult to recommend such a game. Although the core of the game is not fundamentally flawed, the execution of it ends up resulting in a game that, whilst it has some appealing aspects, ends up being extremely hackneyed. Extreme RPG fans or those that can't get enough of the table game and want to flesh out their concept of the Mage Knight universe may want to take a look, but it's difficult to recommend this title to anyone else, especially considering the vast array of better ones out there.
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