Evil Islands: Curse of the Lost Soul

Role-playing games are a curious beast. In other genres, years are invested into graphics engines. In the role-playing game genre, graphics are allowed to slide in favor of gameplay balance and story line. Evil Islands, a new game from Russia, has set out to change the way RPGs are developed forever. The game gives us intense action with beautiful graphics. Play balancing? Who needs it!! Story lines? They appear to have been written by a third-grade English class?? Evil Islands is without a doubt the best piece of garbage I ever played.

The problem is, there is no rhyme or reason for the combat, and the game’s rhythm is just not right . Zak goes out and fights a boar. They trade blows. Zak never gets hit, takes the boar down to one hit point. The boar suddenly lands a head shot on Zak, killing him instantly. Game over. Is this an exceptional combat? Not at all. You can lose about any combat in the game with one good hit on you. If Zak does kill the boar, rest assured there would be 3 more on him before the end of combat. The game degenerates quickly into Quicksave and Quickload. Zak does eventually get companions to help him fight, but only amounts to more frustration as they die more easily than the hero.

So, you’re thinking, why play it? Well, the game has one of those stupid stat systems that makes you more powerful as you go along. You can buy weapon blueprints and make your own artifacts. You can create your own spells. You keep gaining hope that one day you will be more powerful than the monsters. It is a false hope, realize, but it keeps you going on that one more idiotic quest.

Graphics are truly awesome in this game. The monsters all look nasty and deadly, the characters are paper dolled, so they show in detail exactly the armor you crafted. The camera can pan and zoom for as much and little detail as you want. Hills roll, rain pours, and the sky moves from dusk to dawn. The graphical engine is perfect.

As for the sound, some composers have made some masterful pieces while being deaf. The same can’t be said about the deaf people who were hired to do the voice-overs. The best thing the game did was making the dialogue skip when you click it. This is without a doubt the blandest and worse voice acting I have ever heard in a game. You will wish for the days of plain text. It’s bad enough that the lines are asinine, but when spoken by the kid who played a mute sheep at the Christmas play because, dammit, it’s Christmas, and even third graders have standards… wait.. I digress, but you get the point.

Idiot loses memory, gets trapped on island. Idiot goes on 80+ stupid quests and solves petty villager’s problems to remember that before he lost his memory, he was a loser. Add whatever story elements you want, actually, because you will click through most of the dialogue because it’s so painful to listen to.

Damn, the interface is great. Screens for making items, with sorting screens for easy grouping. Easy to spin the map around and zoom in and out of the 3D environment. Pausable real-time combat. Quick keys for everything. The interface could not be better for this type of game.