Witchaven
I do not recommend this game to anyone. But there are people who like it, enough people to motivate Capstone to produce a sequel.
I tried it out after I played Daggerfall a lot and got interested in 3D RPGs in general. But this game is just a Doom clone with experience points thrown in, a bit better graphics (well, that's not too difficult), weapons that break and no healing items. At least I never saw one before I got killed. One for the masochists.
Maybe the saddest part is that this game used the excellent Build Engine, along with William Shatner's TekWar it was the first commercial game to do so, but it uses very few of its features. It is the fate of that engine to have been used in lots of crappy games, and only one that became really famous: Duke Nukem 3D.
Very nice graphics. Yup. Verrrry nice graphics. I want to emphasize this, because that's all this game has. No, no, wait.. it also has the annoyance of "realistically" breaking weaponry at the most inopportune times. It seems to want to try and get the horror inherent in Hexen and Heretic… but the only thing really frightening is the control.
The good news… it took less than a few seconds to delete it from my hard drive.
The game is a mix of a traditional role playing game and a "doomlike" or better "hereticlike" game. On the role playing side of the game you find the classic experience points, level of experience which can give access to more powerful spells and better weapons handling. It is quite straight forward, you get experience when you find some specific items or when you kill something. There are some magic potions, health potions, poison, strength, magic rings, amulets, etc. On the doomlike side, you find a freedom of movement, a superimposed map, keys specific to each door, the game divided into levels, protections and powerups, teleports, four difficulty levels with the respawn of monsters as the toughest.
