Swords and Sorcery - Underworld - Definitive Edition

Looking for a Might & Magic or Wizardry ? Search no further. This game has ALL the elements of those RPG of old

If you're in the TL:DR crowd all you need to know is that I've requested a refund after only 20 minutes. This game is one of the worst tile based old-school RPGs that I've ever played. The tutorial claims there are buttons to click so you can move, the tutorial points to the location where the buttons are supposed to be but there's nothing there. There are four options for movement and while they work you can't re-bind keys for some reason. The graphics are repetitive and boring. Everything looks the same. There's no tile variation, each wall looks like the last. All the floors and doors look the same. The loading screen doesn't tell you to click to continue, but if you don't it'll just sit there. The game opens in windowed mode and is positioned so you can't see part of the screen. There is text to show the turn order during combat but you can barely read it due to the colour of the text, it'll blend into any lighter coloured backgrounds and is difficult to read. Character creation is clunky and doesn't explain anything about class abilities at all. Character portraits are limited and they almost all look a bit off, some are pretty good, but most have issues. Apparently the art was done by a professional comic illustrator. I highly doubt that. Some of the art, maybe, but the majority looks like it was done by an amateur with a modicum of talent, but definitely not someone who's a legitimate professional who draws for a living. Sound design is bad, repetitive, and uninspired. In one of my first three combat encounters the enemy wasn't as dangerous as my own party, for some reason I kept getting critical failures and killing my own party members. Yeah, I get the critical failure thing, but during the first few fights the most dangerous thing was hitting or shooting my own party members. I did put points into luck for every single character but I didn't know that they could "accidentally" kill each other. Combat has zero animation, there's no life to it. There's no life to the levels, either. Nothing moves around. You can't see enemies. There's no flicker from torches. No echo as you walk around. Doors don't swing open, creak, or make any noise other than a click if you lock pick them, or walk through them if they're open. Positives? Uh.. the minimap works. This is a good first attempt at an RPG, or practice game, but it's certainly not something that I can support or recommend. Sorry devs, you have to do a bit more than this to impress some of us. Edit: Steam denied my refund request (only 20 mins played but beyond the 14 day window and they denied the request even though part of the UI is missing) so I guess you get to keep my money. At least I got it in a bundle at a hefty discount. Edit: Reply to the Dev. reply posted on Aug 21, 2021. Thanks for the reply. I'm often rather blunt with my thoughts and reviews, not everyone takes it so well. I did not see these arrows that you speak of. If they exist then they're so hard to see that even when the tutorial points to them I didn't see them. That's an issue you should fix. The text based initiative list is nearly impossible to see as well. White text on off-white wall tiles is not good. Whatever happened with the crit failures was ridiculous and perhaps it was some very unlucky RNG but when that happens in the first few minutes of the game it really doesn't make you want to keep playing. I have to agree that it makes sense that you could hit a friendly character that's in melee combat with an enemy if you choose to attack that enemy with a ranged attack. I heard no sounds for the doors opening. Perhaps a glitch is to blame. I'm using some pretty high end headphones so I should have heard it for at least one of the doors I opened. Thanks for explaining that character art isn't the artist's strong suit - but I wouldn't brag about someone being a professional on the store page if they're not actually drawing the things they usually draw professionally. That creates a certain expectation and it's a big let down when we think we're going to see something amazing and we see things that look like a reasonably good amateur effort. I struggle drawing stick figures but have been looking at drawings, graphic novels, comics, video game art, and other artwork for a very, very long time so I'm rather particular about perspective, symmetry, shading, line work, and a lot of the finer details. Heck, I live with an artist - I just have no talent in that area. If you can hover over things to get descriptions then it would be nice to know right away, and so would the F9 thing... I don't recall seeing anything about that when I started the game. Maybe this is a RTFM situation where I neglected to read the manual like I would have in the late 80s. As for repetitive graphics - I believe that you can keep the aesthetics and style of a game from a specific time period without sticking 100% to the faults, flaws, and shortcomings a lot of those games had due to hardware limitations. Would it really hurt to toss a tiny bit of variation into some of the graphics? It wouldn't lose that 1980s style just because you gave me something different to look at or slightly varied a few bricks from one wall to the next. Our mutual friend and I have a lot of similar thoughts on many games but occasionally we're polar opposites and this is one of those instances.

At a glance, this looks like a love letter to the old days of computer RPGs. It's definitely driven by the original Wizardry, Might and Magic, and Bard's Tale. However, while it does have a somewhat decent combat system, it's too unstable for me. I've had multiple times it's locked up at the start of combat, requiring a alt-tab and force close in order to escape. It just hangs there forever, waiting on the enemy to do something. Anything. So of the 23 minutes I've played, only 4 were actual gameplay; the rest sitting waiting out of hope that it would not stay hung on the enemy's turn in combat. Obviously, with each combat breaking the game like this, it's unplayable, and thus not worth buying. So as much as I love this style of game, I'll have to pass on this one. It's locked up more times than all my hundreds and thousands of hours in Might and Magic 1-8, Wizardry 1-8, and Bard's Tale 1-3 combined have locked up in my lifetime. Sadly, it looks like I would have enjoyed this considerably, as this style game is all but unheard of even in indie games. EDIT. I have roughly twice the minimum clock speed for an i7 CPU, and a RTX 3060 GPU, with 8 times the recommended RAM (DDR4). Dev is probably mining crypto in the background, if something that should run on a potato can't run on this laptop. The only configuration issue is the malware running in the background. Reported.

Very interesting art style. Even on lowest difficulty though, I'd step outside the starting inn and lose someone to a gnome killing them. I can get behind the old school feel, but at least let me win a fight with some damage rather than killing my party members with no tutorial.

Great game for the price. One way to describe it...wizardry but with updated game mechanics. Awesome dungeon crawler.

Jeu vraiment à l'ancienne, qui pourrait être sympa s'il n'était pas pourri par des bugs fréquents qui viennent périodiquement ruiner votre progression. On est vraiment très loin de Might and Magic dont se réclame le développeur. J'arrête.