The story is surprisingly well thought out. The beginning of the game starts with an invasion on the town of Silverfall (hence the name of the game), which acts as a tutorial as you fight off the bad guys with a powerful mage. During this time, the survivors from Silverfall are left to take refugee in a swamp location as the evil in Silverfall still persists. This is where you get to control your character for the first time, a young apprentice to the mage who stayed behind to save Silverfall. You will be required to aid fellow refugees with dangerous tasks such as killing zombies or recovering convoys that got caught up in all of the mess. Eventually, you will travel further through the world to discover the whereabouts of the Archmage that was responsible for the wreckage at Silverfall, and your master that has also gone missing. After several hours the game picks up quite dramatically, offering a fairly thrilling experience until the end.
In terms of customisation, Silverfall allows you to create a persona from four races - elves, goblins, humans and trolls - and change their appearance in a variety of ways. As you dive further into the game you will have the ability to equip your character with new weapons and armour, clearly distinguishing them on the battlefield – so practically, if you have played an action-RPG in the past you will understand the fundamentals of Silverfall’s customisation. Another aspect of a typical action-RPG game are the quests, with Silverfall borrowing a handful of ideas and concepts from any other pre-existing action-RPG or MMORPG you may have played. You will have your minor fetching quests where you will need to recover items, or other quests where you need to kill X amount of enemies. Additionally, there are plenty of dungeon-crawling quests that will require you to takeout large beasts, for favourable rewards in return of course. One of the great aspects of Silverfall is that the majority of the quests in the game provide a waypoint as to where you should go to accomplish your goals. This is extremely helpful, since the quest text is generally a tad sparse in details.
Developing your character, and your party, is all part of the experience.
Silverfall does not incorporate a class system, but rather a fairly flexible skill tree system that allows you to mix up your skills in a variety of ways, ultimately forming a hybrid of classes rather than being stuck as a solitary class. The skill tree is organised into three groups: combat, magic and other. Combat is further divided into melee, ranged and passive abilities (increased skills with one-handed weapons etc, faster shooting speed, etc.); the magic tree consists of elemental, light and dark; the last tree is broken up into your nature or technology skills, as well as your race specific skills. Additionally, the interface of the game is fairly simple to wrap your mind around. You can switch between melee weapons to ranged weapons by simply pressing either the ‘1’ or ‘2’ button, and you can also map certain abilities to number keys. It is not as manageable as Titan Quest or Diablo, but it works nevertheless.
The game also implements a party system, which allows you to tackle the main adventure with the aid of a few trustworthy allies. You will be able to recruit new allies to your party by general story development or by fulfilling certain quest chains. Allies are AI controlled, yet you are given the flexibility of determining how party members react during combat – whether they stay back and shoot, heal or jump right into the heat of the battle. Interestingly, you’ll also be able to develop relationships with each party member by the way you interact with them throughout your adventure, sometimes offering optional ally-specific quest chains.
Issues begin to persist once engaging in combat though. Much like any other action-RPG, you will be able to hold down the left-mouse button to continuous attack an enemy. In the case of Silverfall though, this method is not always implemented. You’ll often have to click and hold the left-mouse button a few times before it performs that continuous striking loop, which can become incredibly frustrating when fighting a bunch of enemies at once. This is virtually the only problem with the combat in Silverfall, but it is honestly a quite hurtful one.
Expect to bump into a few typical fantasy creatures.
The game does a fairly ordinary job of fleshing out its Nature vs. Technology concept (sort of like a ‘Good vs. Evil’ concept). The world is split into two different alignments: your hippie nature loving characters who want to save the land and your more intellectual characters who see the world developing by cutting down forests and adding cogs to all of their work. There are quests throughout the game that will slowly align you to either of the two, but quite often these quests are rarely distinguishable - so deciding what quests are for which alignment is often difficult. In addition, while the concept is fascinating, there is very little in terms of rewards. There are various items and skills acquired in the game that can only be used once reaching a certain point in either of the alignments, but other than that there are minimal incentives to work towards. It all feels a tad unfinished in some ways, unfortunately.
Silverfall also has a few more slight annoyances. Being from a French developer there are often a few translation issues with quest text, which either has words missing or makes no sense at all; though this is a rarity, it still occurs. Balancing also becomes a bit of an issue when deciding which skills would benefit you during combat. Ultimately, magic skills are far too inconsistent in their balancing when compared to the overpowered melee abilities – you can often turn away from the computer, press and hold one key and destroy an enemy with relative ease. The game also has several bugs that can often hurt the performance of the game. The aforementioned issues could easily be fixed with a few patches, which could possibly bump up the appeal of the game a little.
Besides all of this, there is also a decent multiplayer mode, allowing up to 8 players to tackle the campaign mode or freely roam the game world via LAN or online options. These modes either allow you to fulfill quests, kill enemies or participate in player versus player action. There are unfortunately no dedicated servers, meaning the performance of online multiplayer matches is reliant on the host’s computer.
While it is not problem-free, the comic book style is an exciting approach.
On its outer-coat, Silverfall delivers a rather seesawing presentation, which is not necessary fantastic but neither is it appalling. The game incorporates a comic book style, which works extremely well when trying to define characters; and in particular your own, as they continue to grow in strength and gain new equipment. Special effects also look appealing due to this graphical approach. Animation is fluid and well judged when using certain weapons and abilities, and there’s a neat physics system is place too. In regards to the rest of the game, it does not fair too well, unfortunately. Environments generally look a tad dull and lack detail, often hurting the ability to enjoy the locations you travel to. To add to this, the overall structuring of the environments is a tad sub-par. There are often mountains that are too high to climb, resulting in you being sometimes forced down paths.
Audio is decidedly average in all areas. Sound effects are fairly simple, and the soundtrack is far too repetitive and generic. You will either travel to new areas that have the same track, or just a slight variation. The game also features voice acting in areas to progress the story further. There really is not any standout acting, with a lot of lines sometimes feeling a little unnatural or forced.
And now we finish – Silverfall is not particularly a bad game, it just is not a groundbreaking game in a genre that has had several heavyweights that still shine to this very day. The game has a handful of irritating bugs that you would typically never see in other games, and ultimately hurts the final product. There is still plenty of enjoyment to be found with Silverfall though, and is probably best recommended for action-RPG fans only.
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