Retroview - Depths of Peril

Official Site: http://www.soldak.com/Depths-of-Peril/Overview.html
Steam Page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/23600/

Source: Youtube Channel SoldakEnt

It's been a little over 4 years since Depths of Peril released, but I've honestly never heard of it until this year.  I bought it off steam a month ago for $5 during one of the daily deals as I'm going into a Top-Down Action RPG phase of sorts at the moment with games like Titan Quest, Diablo 2, and Torchlight all in wait of Diablo 3.  Depths of Peril is an RPG/Strategy game which sounds confusing at first, but makes sense when put into play.  There are a number of factions (that can be adjusted by the player) in a town who can either ally with each other or eliminate each other anytime during the play.  The game is almost like an MMO, but played as a single-player game.  The player chooses the settings of difficulty level, character class, and special rules like Hardcore mode (perma-death) in the beginning of each new game and a randomly generated world is created.  A player can play in any way they want as long as it benefits them in dominating over all the other factions.  The game is played a lot like Diablo, with elements of World of Warcraft, the strategy is a lot like Total War or Civilization, and the on-going persistence of everything happening around the player is like many MMORPGs out now.  The player can fulfill quests for NPCs in-town, recruit party members, create diplomacies with other factions, fight bosses, learn any skills from their class (no tier tree, so no pre-reqs for new skills), and raid other factions.

My first two reactions when starting the game was: "wow, the graphics are ugly" and "man, this is confusing".  It's one of those games where it drops the player into the world with little to no explanation on what to do.  The objective is simple: dominate all other factions by either diplomacy or by destruction.  There is a tutorial or sorts in the very beginning, but it's long-winded and still confusing afterwards.  It does take a while to learn how to play, but the fun starts rolling when you know what to do.  To go back to the graphics: the models are so blocky and the colors are so convoluted that it's difficult to navigate.  Objects blended with the environment around it, NPCs were hard to find, and it gets really messy during large mob battles.  After a few hours, I got used to the maps and was able to semi get around.  I still thought the graphics weren't too much to look at though.  And if you like music in your RPGs, well you'll only hear like one of them in-town.

With the aesthetics of the game lacking in polish or quality, everything boils down to the gameplay.  Fortunately, the game is pretty fun.  After getting a few levels to grab a few skills, recruiting a party member, and figuring out how quests work the game can get pretty fast-paced and hectic.  Enemy faction leaders will do quests and fight monsters like the main player would and sometimes finish quests that the player had which denies the reward for the player.  Boss monsters are in the middle of a field and can create quite a mob when spawned enemies decide to join the party.  I do hate some of the quests (as I often do in a lot of RPGs with "quests" or "sidequests" in them) such as the delivery ones as it never specifies where the NPC is other than which field they're residing in, and even then it can be an easter egg hunt to no avail.  There are time limits to a lot of quests, so it puts the player even more on edge in trying to complete a quest.  When the player feels ready, they can raid another faction and their party members to destroy their main crystal.  The game almost feels like playing World of Warcraft in a matter of hours by creating a strong team, leveling the character, grabbing effective gear, and going on a Raid or PvP.  After I dominated all factions for the first time, it allowed me to create new settings with the character with levels, skills, and equipment intact so that a new game began with new factions.  Quests will continually be added, new boss monsters will keep spawning throughout the world, and new equipment can be obtained as the player levels up and attempts to raid more factions.  The game is truly unique and has a certain charm to it that makes it stand out from the crowd.  The game was a very nice distraction and I wouldn't mind going back to it once in a while just to experience a "raid" once again.

Soldak Entertainment (the developers of Depths of Peril) has a few other games such as Din's Curse.  Although a lot of their RPGs kind of look the same, their gameplay are different (Din's Curse allows for 141 class combinations).  If you're into Action-RPGs and don't mind experience a unique twist to it, I'd recommend grabbing it on Steam when it's less than $5.