ROSS'S GAME DUNGEON: REVENANT

[ScottD.Betson]

The CD audio thing reminds me of an interesting quirk with the GoldSrc engine. Pop an audio CD in your drive, any audio CD really. Load up the original Half-Life. Even in the Steam version, it'll still play the music from the CD in the drive. My friend says that Quake also does this and he found that a certain album (he says Alice in Chains - Dirt) meshes very well with the gameplay. I wonder how many other games from that era have that quirk.

I remember that happened to me when I had a burned cd (not literally burned, but songs i put on there) and it meshed well since I had Ecstasy of Gold by Ennio Morricone playing at the beginning of the game, i was like wtf?!

[ThatDarnOwl]

One reason why I watch Ross's game dungeon is I actually get really good game recommendations from it (A good example being Dungeon Siege. I hadn't even heard of the game before Ross and I've since completed it and really enjoyed it). And I had initially written off Revenant due to Ross's review because of the aforementioned difficulty spike he experienced, but decided to get it on GOG anyway. I wouldn't say I had as much of a horror story with running the game as Ross did, I did have to limit the game to 16 bit colors and force it to run in 640x480 to get it to work though.

 

I noticed I had a very different experience with the game and found it seemingly scratched an itch I never knew i had. The game reminds me a lot of Dark Souls due to how brutal it's combat system is but also how the game doesn't explain a lot of it's mechanics. Like Dark Souls is similar in terms of how specific stats are significantly more important than others, in it's case Endurance is a must for almost every character because it lets you move faster in armor. With Revenant it has two stats, Agility and Reflexes. I found that investing in those two made the game a lot easier. Ross's analogy of the ninja with a feather was actually a superior strategy since a lot of the tougher enemies in the game jump around a lot. I also found the game's combat system had a surprising amount of depth with it's three attacks and how you could do special moves you unlock with them. I actually don't click the left mouse button while playing it now I just chain specific attacks and use a ton of special attacks. The game is extremely grindy though and they probably upped the difficulty late into development to elongate playtime past 10 hours. It reminds me of a lot of other 90s RPGs like Baldur's Gate where if you just do what the game tells you to do inorder to beat it, you can beat the entire thing in probably 4 hours but the game is so hard you end up having to do tons of other optional content to get stronger.

 

I also think the movement was surprisingly good. It added something different to the game I ended up preferring to "click to move". One thing I really dislike about Diablo is how little positioning or reacting to enemies matters because all you're focused on is clicking to move and clicking to attack. It makes the game get a little tedious overtime since you're mostly just reacting to every enemy the same way. One thing I liked about Revenant was because you're physically moving your character by holding down the mouse you end up focusing less on your own attacks and focusing more on positioning. Like I was thinking more about dodging and retreating from harder engagements and when I should block, and not quickly mashing the attack button to lower the mob's HP.

 

I also ended up utilizing the magic system. The magic system in Revenant is actually something I really like and I feel like Ross underestimated it's usefulness. I didn't find the lack of Mana regeneration that bad as a lot of ingame food restores it and at some point you get so wealthy you can buy tons of restore mana potions. But not only that, I found it a lot easier to grasp than he made it out. Maybe because the magic system was clearly inspired by Ultima Underworld and I played that before Revenant so it came to me a lot easier (mixing runes together to form specific spells and saving them in a spellbook you can summon later). I also played Arx Fatalis which did the same thing except there you physically drew the Runes. I also didn't need to keep individual spell scrolls in my inventory as once you discover a spell it stays in the player's magic screen and shows you which runes you need to cast it. You can also physically drag spells from the spell screen into your quick select so once you discover a spell you never have to combine its runes again after that.

 

Moreover the magic system was surprisingly broken, there were specific spells you can get at level 1 that completely destroy most enemies that take a while to kill with just the sword. I've read a walkthrough on the game and most of the bosses are also decimated by specific spells, like the final boss can be made completely trivial with the invisibility spell. The fist fighting enemy Ross was having trouble with I also read that most people made the fight trivial using a fist fighting buff spell you can obtain and a bunch of really powerful damage dealing spells to even the odds.

 

The game's save system I felt also wasn't as bad as Ross made out because of the extremely useful Quicksave button. Which could be rebound, like I could rebound it to control Q and do it multiple times in a fight if I wanted. And because quicksaving saved a new file every time I could repeat a fight as much as I liked in as many places as I wanted. It's a lot better than a lot of RPG's I've played especially given you can actually rebind it since a lot of rpgs bound quicksave to some really annoying part of the keyboard like F-12. Or in most cases completely lacked it at all and force you to manually save/reload.

 

I do agree the maze-like levels aren't great, but I did get the minimap to work so it's not as bad as he makes out. It's clear given the technical state of the game (how it has a lot of pretty big bugs like if you talk to an NPC, quicksave, reload and talk to them again you need to leave the area or quit the game and reload to talk to them again) that Eidos rushed the game and this probably contributed to how repetitive the environments were and the overall jank to it. But it has reminded me a lot of other games I've really liked, like Morrowind and Dark Souls. It's probably the first time I really disagreed with a Ross video after playing the game he reviewed.