Not even your average killing machine. Review

Not even your average killing machine.

It has been ages since the Harbinger was built. Originally intended to

be a warm, cuddly machine sent out to spread the Overlord’s brutal regime, the

great battleship is now home to the descendants of its first crew and newer arrivals

whose purpose is unknown, but they slay anyone who gets in their way. Sounds like

a fun place.

Unfortunately, first impressions can be deceiving. Harbinger looks

like the latest Diablo clone…and, sadly, that’s all it is. They even

go so far as to proudly proclaim that fact on the box. But where Diablo

was new for its day and Diablo 2 built upon its predecessor,

Harbinger suffers from a lack of originality and what appears to be a

rush to market.

The graphics

in Harbinger are decent, but nothing too complicated. You play the game

from a standard top-down, isometric view. If you have a relatively new computer,

it will be able to run this game; there’s no need for a 128MB video card here.

In fact, there is no way to tweak the graphics at all in the game. There’s one

resolution, one color setting…heck, the “option” menu doesn’t give you a single

graphical option. Well, it does let you set the volume.

You play as one of three available races: A human (we made the game, so we

always get to star in it), a Gladiator (think ED209

from Robocop) and a Culibine (an alien mystic). The human and Gladiator

have the ability to use gadgets such as cameras and mines, while the Culibine

uses “amps” to augment her mystical energies. Each character also has a ranged

and a melee attack, which are used to kill the countless, mindless creatures

that attack you. And attacking them is just a mouse click away.

That’s right, to kill anything, you have to click on it repeatedly. Left mouse

click is ranged attack, right mouse click is melee. That’s it. In fact, the

control scheme is so simple that the developers didn’t even bother to put in

any sort of training/instruction level to teach you how to play. Nope – when

you start the game, you’re supposed to know how to play immediately, including

how to use the various menus. There are no in-game instructions of any sort.

Instructions? We don’t need no stinkin’ instructions!

As you can imagine, this complex control scheme translates to captivating

gameplay. See an enemy, click on it like mad. See another enemy, click on it

next. Ever play those ‘mouse training’ programs that came with the first computers

with mice? That’s basically what this is. The gadget interaction is nifty, but

only a small break from the click frenzy. Diablo was released about six

years ago, and Harbinger succeeds in bringing nothing really new to the

table gameplay-wise.

Technically this is an RPG, and it does in fact have some stats to tweak and

lots of items to find. But again, this was found in the original Diablo,

and simply satisfying this requirement does not make it good.

While I’m not sure exactly how long this game was in development, they obviously

spent very little of that time fleshing out the story. The intro movie actually

has very little to do with anything. You get to sit and watch a fat alien Emeril

Legasse cook up some tender worm vittles. Bam! Into the blender! The video

is little more than a random short and tells you nothing about the game, the

ship Harbinger, or anything else, for that matter.

The bulk of

the story is finally conveyed through asides by whichever character you choose.

Told from a personal point of view, it’s just speech accompanied by text. And

it’s rather vague in the beginning, not even giving you enough story to WANT

to know the rest.

Every Diablo-type game has a central place/town/inn where the character starts

his journey, gets quests, etc. In Harbinger, this central hub is called

Torvus Junction. It consists of two people: Torvus (the guy you generally work

for), and Ona (the weapons trader). That’s it. As you learn over the course

of the story, that truly IS it, because Torvus Junction is one of the

last places on the ship that hasn’t descended into chaos. Unfortunately, returning

again and again to a single place that can be viewed almost entirely without

moving (it’s that small) just feels repetitive.

Did I mention that this game seemed rushed to market? Besides no training,

no graphical settings and poor story development, the game has installation

problems. The game disc will automatically run installation every time you put

it in. And it doesn’t open to a menu, it just starts running the installer immediately.

Plus, it never gives you a shortcut on your desktop or even in the “Start” menu

to run the game – you have to make it yourself. Instead of taking the

two weeks required to fix these minor (but annoying) problems, the publisher

simply printed a slip of paper telling you how to set up a shortcut yourself

and how to disable autorun. That’s just inexcusably cheap and it’s amazing this

ever got out of their testing lab without those problems being fixed.

All in all, Harbinger defines mediocrity and is a great example of

a problem in PC gaming today. While the PC is the most powerful of the gaming

platforms, many developers and publishers seem more happy to push out rehashes

of successful games instead of trying something new and different. In their

quest for the almighty dollar, they took shortcuts and ended up with a sub-par

game.