Just finished downloading the demo and have had a quick look at it.
Graphically it's VERY impressive, like Morrowind meets Middle Earth, and captures
the "feel" of the books and film quite well, though the hobbit characters have a
rather "cartoony" look.
Gameplay-wise however it doesn't look very impressive - a mixture of non-combat
sections where you simply walk around and talk to everyone, with very limited pre-set dialogue,
along with a few fetch-item quests (which are totally irrelevant since there are no RPG elements of character development or item upgrading)
- and combat sections where you hack your way through endless hordes of orcs, goblins, wargs etc. with
a very limited selection of weapons or spells, eating generic healing items from time to time. Seems like
a typical mass-market, multi-platform, polished but shallow game; a bit like Dragonriders of Pern, a similar
waste of a good setting with an incredibly shallow and limited game.
However it appears that the data files for the game (stored in a number of different
files, with different extensions but the same format) are all stored in a simple, uncompressed
"flat" archive format. I'm sure someone with more binary file/hex knowledge than me would
be able to create an unpacker/extractor utility.
From the text in some files, I think that the game uses the same, or similar, engine to Drakan 2 - maybe
the file format is the same as Drakan 1? Did anyone ever create a file unpacker for that game?
|
Threaded Mode
