. . . minus all the things I forgot while expending energy to write this post.

As a Diablo 2 clone, Depths of Peril is a decent though not groundbreaking game. There are dungeons with monsters who collect piles of loot; all desperately waiting for you to come along and explore, exterminate, and collect and then turn around and do it all again. There are four character classes – the staple fighter, mage, cleric, thief – and each one has 3 unique skill trees (and a fourth special tree that each class has access too). There is the color coded item system – now a genre staple thanks to Diablo – where green is a magic item, orange a unique "named" artifact, and so on and so forth. Graphically, the game has a retro but pleasant look. There's large variety to creature graphics and the art style is very effective, ranging from the familiar (giant scorpions) to the bizarre (like the big behemoth looking poison gas belching crab-spider spawning things. I'm, not even sure what they're called). That variety extends into how the monsters "play", if you will. There are a wide variety of monster abilities, employing a wide variety of elemental or annoyance inducing attacks (like stunning, or immobility, or preventing you from using special abilities). Not to mention champion monsters (green color to the name, and much tougher), elites (yellow/gold color, and tougher still) and unique/named (orange, and they're often really nasty). There are quests to do, quests in spades, and I don't know if the player will ever run out of tasks to complete. It all works well enough, if unspectacularly. Depths of Peril, though, isn't just a Diablo 2 clone.

Your player character happens to run an adventurer's covenant and you compete with other adventurer's covenants which are AI controlled. You will compete for the hiring of henchmen, one of whom can accompany you "in the field", all of whom can accompany you on a raid (and also defend against invading raiders). You will compete for some quests, I think, though not many. And you will compete to stay alive; covenants can form alliances and engage in limited commerce with each other but in the end, there can be only one. Or one and his or her allies; there are allied victories and the rewards you get will note whether you are the alpha dog or not, apparently. Interaction with the covenants is somewhat limited. You can trade money/items for money/items. Or influence/crystals for influence/crystals. All trade gains favor, and of course you can just gift things to other covenants if you want to make nice with them. Influence is won from doing, well, pretty much everything. Complete quests, kill stuff, defeat other covenants. It all ups your influence score. This dictates how many crystals you get from the town when tax time comes up. Crystals can also be used to pay the salaries of monster guards for the covenant hall, or to pay for rumors about other covenants (said rumors can lead to losses in influence).

The quickest way to bring about the defeat of your rivals is to see to their destruction yourself, of course. When you elect to raid a covenant, you have the option of selecting from zero to all of the NPCs you have hired as covenant members to go on the raid (though I cannot imagine why you'd take less than the full compliment). A special teleportation gate appears in your covenant hall that takes you directly to the other covenant, and away you go. You can attack a Lifestone directly but while you do this the other covenant's NPCs and even some monster guards will be attacking you. The twist in the mechanics here is that the actual covenant members and the life stone are tied together. As you defeat enemy characters (not the guards), they'll get resurrected by the covenant after a short period of time. To do this, the Lifestone expends some of it's hp. So by killing enemies, you will whittle down the Lifestone. Once you get to a certain point – I'm not clear what the threshold is, but it's very low, say 5% – you must attack the Lifestone directly to finish it off. You can attack it directly at any time, but killing enemy defenders ultimately makes your job alot easier, since you earn a respite from their defense and ultimately whittle down the Lifestone. Once you destroy the Lifestone, that covenant is defeated and a nice little reward chest appears, and you can go about your business elsewhere. Be the last covenant standing an additional, larger reward chest appears in town. And the game is won.

One need not quit a world once one has conquered it, however. One can continue playing, focusing on the traditional Diablo 2 aspect, and spend time slaughtering the hordes of monsters that await beyond the walls of town. The quests in the game can get interesting, a reflection of the covenant mechanics. Oh, there's standard fair: kill X number of monster Y or collect Z of item W. But then there are quests to deal directly with threats to the town. Nothing beats returning from a lengthy dungeon crawl to find your favorite merchant has been turned to stone. Or that someone has been laying traps all over town. Or that there is a rampaging boss monster attacking merchants within the city walls. A poisoned water supply means that everything is more expensive in town. Plague will infect and eventually kill merchants, whereas monsters might kill them more quickly. Merchants and quest giving NPCs fight back, and they do respawn after death (it takes some time though). Messages appear keeping the player up to date on various goings on in the world – there is a new NPC to be recruited or a thief stealing from merchants. The player can ignore or deal with these issues at his or her leisure. But they matter – they will eventually impact the player's ability to interact with the towns folk, and the player needs them if for no other reason than to get more quests, or turn in quests, or stock up on supplies, or sell off all that shiny new loot. This is a nice twist, though it got frustrating at one point when the NPCs who I needed to speak to to get quest rewards (and free up precious quest slots) were both dead. There is also some sort of "story" quest line that appears in every game and does not scale initially with world level. I haven't fully explored it yet but you have the option of telling the person who starts it "sorry, I'll skip it" if you want to focus on other things.

Eventually you will want to quit and start a new world and a nice bonus in this is that your covenant carries over intact, and that's actually quite a bit of resources, as there are a number of neat features in a covenant's hall. The two stashes are welcome – each has 8 bag slots (and so far bags come in 4, 6, and 8 spot capacity in a very familiar MMORPG-esque inventory system). One stash is for your covenant. The other is shared across every character you create and play a game with – a welcome feature that has been difficult to come by in Diablo 2 like games until only recently (Titan Quest had first a player mod for it and then made it part of the game in an expansion; the mixed quality effort from Flagship studios, Hellgate London, features a shared-account stash). The character can place 4 relics onto pedestals inside the covenant. Each one provides one or more bonuses to every member of the covenant (e.g. +10 fire resistance or +2 strength), or a direct bonus to the covenant (like a bonus to tax collection). There is also a bookshelf with dozens of spots for magical books. So far, the books I have seen just boost things like strength or dexterity. All of this stuff follows you into your new world, so there's a sense of gradually building up the covenant over time and certainly a nice carrot that draws you to filling the bookshelf or finding a nice relic upgrade. Additionally, every teleportation stone that you have activated out in the field remains "in play", so you can head out into higher level areas right from the start. Another nice touch is the save system. Since there is no ultimate defeat, there is only a save and quit option. But the game periodically saves progress in the background – pretty quickly in my experience. And if you've got an active town portal, saving and quitting does not remove it (a nice change from Diablo 2).

It's not a perfect game by any stretch. You can only have up to 6 quests active at once, and it's possible to get stuck with them if there's an unfortunate series of events in town (more reason to pay attention to what's going on!) – there are two primary quest givers and you can't complete quests if they got killed by a rampaging boss mob (the weapons and armor merchants sometimes give quests, and there is a special NPC who gives quests regarding things like the town water supply getting poisoned or some merchant being turned to stone). Also, it hasn't been uncommon for me to have a full slate and be unable to take on new quests (particularly annoying when you can't turn in any of your current quests but need to take a quest to cure that damn plague). The random quests haven't ever stopped appearing in any game I've played so far, so ditching one isn't the end of the world but also isn't preferred. When buying and selling, one can hover over an item and press space to easily accomplish the act, and right-clicking on an item will equip it. But there is still a decent amount of dragging and dropping when you get to putting things in the stash or giving equipment to your covenant-mates. I like the idea behind the bag system; it's standard MMO fair where the player has bag slots and each one opens into it's own little inventory window. But this gets unwieldy; I'd just as soon see one large inventory pain that shrinks and grows based on "equipped bags" and some handy filter buttons. Clicking on targets in the heat of battle can get frustrating, as things get hectic and creatures in close proximity tend to bunch up. Once you attack a monster you'll automatically attack with your regular attack (something that definitely seems borrowed from typical MMORPG combat systems). Still, it seems to result in too much errant clicking followed by aimless wandering in the thick of combat. Outdoor areas can vary wildly in terms of look and feel and monster combat. But each one is a uniform area with 1 or more exits to other similarly sized zones, and despite the graphical variety there is a sameness feel to them. And there are some bugs. I've had intermittent crashes to the desktop. The autosaving is frequent enough that I rarely lose progress. I believe it saves every time you take or complete a quest, and every time you return to town, but I don't know this for sure.

And, it's a significant price tag for an "indie" title – $30. I don't regret spending my money. But I do think this is a game that has some untapped promise. That isn't to say that it's is a failure for not reaching that promise – it's a pretty interesting take on the action rpg sub-genre it belongs in. It feels like there's a lot of room to grow, design wise, to grow with the covenant mechanics. I would love to interact more with covenants, whether by racing them to a quest objective or possibly even teaming up with them for something more exotic out in the field. And I'd like to see the somewhat dynamic nature of the town expanded on.

Last 5 posts by Grandy

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