Reviews

Platform: XBLA / PSN / PC
Developer: Spiders
Publisher: Focus Home Interactive

Occasionally a game arrives that you have heard nothing about until the moment it lands on your desk waiting for you to review it, often this is a bad sign, but occasionally a rare gem will surface, but which will Faery: Legends of Avalon turn out to be?

Upon loading and starting a new game you are asked to create your character, and while creation options are limited to purely cosmetic changes, there are enough options to allow a variety of looks to be created.

When the short text based intro has finished the game itself will start, a fairly oldschool RPG where all conversations are presented in text only. Gameplay mainly consists of talking to the characters that inhabit the luscious worlds and completing any tasks they ask you to undertake for the usual items and XP. Tasks range from simple fetch/fight missions, to more drawn investigations which will usually involve a string of simple tasks to be completed.

One nice touch is that some tasks can be solved in more than one way, although this is usually a simply choice of brain over brawn. To help you in your quests you will be able to recruit many characters, pirates; dragons; trolls and more, each with their own special abilities, to stand by your side, mostly it is a case of finding which of your new found friends suits your combat style.

Combat is turn based, and involves selecting attacks, spells or potions for each of your characters to use. Each action will take a set amount of action points, and you can queue up different actions until all your action points have been used. Once all the action points have been assigned the screen will come to life as everything is acted out in front of you. The are some really nice animations, and one nice touch is that different characters casting the same spells and attacks have their own unique animations, which adds a little variety to the visuals. After combat is complete you characters will receive experience points.

When you have received enough experience points you will level up, and be asked to spend the skill points you receive. These are used to apply or upgrade a metamorphosis to your faery, not only does this allow you to develop a unique looking faery it will also affect the spells you have available. For example, developing dragonfly wings will give you access the fireball spell, bird wings will give you access to tornado, and butterfly wings will allow for the lightning. You can further augment your character's abilities, wearing different combinations of the 40 weapons and armour found throughout the lands.

There are only four worlds, one hub world and three sub-worlds each visited through mirrors which act as portals. Although the levels themselves are quite small they are beautifully realised, and given the vertical nature of the levels, there is quite a lot packed into each level. As a faery you can fly freely around the levels, which stops traversing the worlds becoming a chore; whether you need to visit the highest peak or lowest cave, simply look in the direction you wish to go and make a bee (or should that be faery?) line for your chosen destination.

Visually the game oozes charm and can't be faulted, the levels set aboard the Flying Dutchman and the city on the back of a giant beetle are particularly well realised. The friends you make and enemies you have to fight have visual flair and charm lavished upon them, and some like the mummies you only see once in the entire game, which seems a shame to have such a visual feast as a mere throw away item. The audio consists a some spot effects and two tunes, one for exploration and one for combat, which whilst this is adequate, a little more variety would have stopped the music from become a little tiresome towards the end of the game.

However the main gripe has to be with the ending of the game. It is becoming all to frequent that games on the Xbox Live Marketplace are ending with 'to be continued...', now this in itself isn't so much of a problem as long as the game itself holds up on it's own doesn't feel like it has been cut in two for the sake of it. Without wanting to give the plot away, after completing the game you are given a final choice of which side you are going to fight for, and that's it, 'to be continued...' appears, and the same text based outtro appears no matter which choice you make.

If the game had managed to put in one final boss fight against whichever party you abandon, then this episode would have felt complete. Although this doesn't ruin an otherwise delightful (if a little short) game it does stop it from receiving the ultimate score it would otherwise have deserved. An utterly charming 8-10 hour RPG romp only mired by some repetitive music and an abrupt ending.