DeathSpank

I recently discovered Ron Gilbert's blog (the creator of Monkey Island). He mentioned that he worked on a game called DeathSpank, and I realised I own it via Humble Bundle. The game is full of Ron Gilbert's humour, and the voice acting kinda reminds me of Family Guy.

The game is a humorous hack-and-slash RPG. You are greeted with a Lord Of The Rings-style narrated intro which tells you about DeathSpank and his quest to find The Artefact and kill the evil king Lord Von Prong.

You can play with keyboard and mouse, or with a controller. I found a controller to be much more comfortable, and the main advantage is that you have 4 weapons mapped to the face buttons. On the keyboard you had 2 pairs and switch with tab.

The game is designed for single-player but does have a co-op mode. It seems one of those Nintendo -style co-op modes where the second player is more of an assistant rather than a unique player.

The mechanics are introduced over time. So at first you just slash at things, but later you are told you can block. Further in, you are told that alternating attacks gives you a combo bonus which deals more damage.

As you kill enemies, you gain experience and they drop coins and loot. Your equipment is the typical RPG style so you have helm, gloves, boots, chest armour and rings. There's an option to auto-equip armour, but not weapons. You may still want to make minor tweaks to gain extra elemental resistance, but I found it's fine to auto-equip. The elements are Nature, Fire, Ice, and Undeath; whatever that means.

Some weapons are special, indicated by their purple name, and trigger a special “Justice” attack when charged. There's also Magical Orbs which provide a limited use spell.

There are potions that instantly heal you, whereas the food items restore damage over time as long as you aren't attacking, or receiving damage. If you want to consume food when engaging enemies, then you must flee; otherwise you use the costlier potions.

It's very advantageous to do the side-quests because it helps you level up. Many quest givers have a series, so going back to claim your reward gives you the next quest. Quest items cannot be found without the quest being active; so unless you are told to collect "spider eyes", killing spiders will not drop spider eyes.

When you level up, you are given 3 options of which attribute to increase. Your max level is 20, at which point you have all the possible upgrades. It's just a matter of choosing the order to unlock them.

There are many Outhouses scattered across the map. These act as respawn points and also provide quick-travel between them. When you die, you return to your last, but you should then venture to your point of death because you do drop an amount of coins.

I felt no need to buy weapons since you sometimes get weapons a level or so above what you can equip. Shop items do look costly, but you soon wrack up the coins, so paying a few thousand for a pizza is nothing when you have 500k. By the end of the game I had 1.5 million coins or so.

Instead of trekking back to the shop when your inventory is full, you can use the Grinder in your inventory to turn items into cash. This streamlines the process. Also, there are several storage chests you can dump items in for later use, and your equipment can be accessed at any one. Although I put many items in, I never felt the need to take any items out again.

The game has minimal puzzles that seem influenced by point-and-click adventures. You need to collect red horns, but can only find white ones. So you need to discover a way of painting them red. You can find fortune cookies which give you hints on how to complete the quests. The first one is often useless, so you need to use a couple of cookies.

Sometimes you find that enemies are too strong, so sometimes it's best to explore a different direction and come back later. If I could get the enemies one-on-one, then I could take the strong enemies down with some skilled use of the block button.

I found that the enemy archers are overpowered. They shoot too fast which can be tricky to retreat from. If you try and run up to them, they are good at fleeing, so you often have to resort to firing arrows back. This isn't that bad when you are one-on-one, but when there are many archers, or an archer and many other enemies trying to attack; then you are in trouble. There are some parts where I just spammed the potions and attack buttons.

I thought the game got easier as the game progressed and was a little too easy at the end. The start of the game may have been very difficult because I was struggling with the mouse and keyboard set-up. The game seems designed for the controller, so I'd recommend sticking with that.

The game uses an interesting graphical style with the addition of 2D foliage. The colour scheme and style looks like Don't Starve. The way the map curves feels like Animal Crossing.

The game takes around 10 hours to complete which is probably around the right length. I did start to lose interest just before that point, which was possibly due to the drop in difficulty.

Deathspank is a diablo-like, or top down loot based action rpg. Mechanically its a very mediocre experience, but what it does to set it apart is the writing. Its written by the guy who worked on Secret of Monkey Island, Ron Gilbert, and it absolutly shows. Its got a lot of that sort of goofy humour, with lots of 4th wall breaking moments and jokes about bacon. The voice acting is suberb, and really makes the jokes more punchier. Thats really the main reason to play this game, because other than that, its really very average both in terms of gameplay as well as visuals.