Reviews / previews
In the action/adventure Silver, you play David, whose wife has been kidnapped by an evil sorcerer. To get her back you'll need to travel the length of medieval Jarrah, acquiring combat techniques, adventuring companions and magicbut in the process, you will find your patience tested far more sorely than your strategic prowess and your joystick responses.
Be sure you look hard and listen well during your first 30 minutes spent with Silver, because it's undeniably the best part of the game. The voiceovers are professionally done and excellent, while the rendered background graphics offer a variety of atmospheric environments in great detail. Unfortunately, they are just 2D backdrops, and nearly all the items and buildings you find while traveling through Jarrah (save for the odd potion, shield, or food item) are noninteractive.
It's more difficult to evaluate Silver's character graphics. Where we normally praise a game's visuals to the extent that its living creatures disguise their polygonal underpinnings, Infogrames deliberately exposes these as part of Silver's "style." The animation for these figures is good, but the figures themselves look like placeholders in an unfinished product. In a word, it jars.
Combat is handled ingeniously, through a series of mouse movements (plus the CTRL key) that generate different attacks--like lung and right swipe--and a generalized defense. At the start you are briefly instructed in combat by David's grandfather, a reasonably good melee fighter who journeys along with you, and attacks on his own initiative.
However, he dies midway through the first "act"--there are eight in all--and the replacements you gradually acquire later in the game (up to six; you can bring along any two, plus your main character, at any moment) must be controlled by you during battles. Otherwise, they stand still. The only way I've found to handle that number successfully in Silver is to group the party together, and beat up on single opponents.
Invariably, however, the arcade-like speed and confusion of multiple characters battling groups of monsters that move about freely means that, sooner or later, you'll click on a party member instead of a foe. This results in all but your own character returning to said vulnerable zombie-like state. (There are also many scenes where the field of action is so wide and the characters reduced so much in size that the mere idea of group control is laughable.) After battle, dead party members quickly return to life. Is this any way to run a game with pretensions to roleplaying?
But then, Silver's role-playing elements are strictly perfunctory. Your main character has several statistical ratings, but you don't generate them yourself, adding and subtracting points in traditional RPG fashion: they're simply assigned. Experience itself has no importance in this game. You don't gain levels by killing critters. All that matters is living long enough to destroy the boss monster you'll find at the end of each act. When that happens, your character automatically gains a level, and increases their statistics.
I had great hopes for Silver. Its atmospheric graphics and voiceovers gave promise of a game rich in mood; but the mood is hopelessly broken by a 2D, non-interactive environment, and a combat system mired in ineffective controls. Take a pass, and save up your gold coins for Nox and Diablo II.-- Barry Brenesal / GamePro
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