Time of Shadows

I'm not entirely sure why the other reviews for this game say that this game is bad. While yes the four starting characters are a bit odd they make very little difference as to what you can achieve in this game. If you like being able to do whatever you want whenenver you want as a mage then this game is simply amazing. Want to be an evil Necromancer and go on a rampage in town turning the people you kill into mindless fodder then go right ahead. Want to be an Air mage calling down lightining on your foes then by all means do it. There are Twelve seperate schools of magic each with there own spells and passive's. Or you can go the way of the warrior and bash your foes heads in with a myriad of weapons. Plus the spells that you chose to specialize in change the way that your character looks and provide passive buffs and debuffs of their own.

A diablo-esque 3rd person overhead RPG. The graphics are outdated. But the game has some really neat features. You can kill anyone, including townspeople. Leave area and hostility is gone. Also your highest level spell in a category transforms a part of your characters body. This means your character will be a hideously deformed freak. This explains why they have such classic character choices as "the bakers wife" (a fat middle aged woman). It is worth 20 bucks if you can dedicate the time to justify that price. I paid 10 bucks. Well worth it.

I find this game new and inventive on its methods. I like it and its open world even better. I do recommend using the tutorial to learn how to play it.

The greatest flaw with this game is the design of the gameworld. The very first area I was thrown into was wide and open...and completely barren. And I'm not just talking in terms of the appearance of the area, but of the design. Yes, there was a huge area for me to go around in, but that space was filled with nothing. Repeated textures for trees and dry bushes, random enemies with no rhyme or reason to their design were rampant, and I was left with the feeling I was walking around a huge chessboard, not the desert area I was supposedly wandering in. Heading to what I could only presume was the hub city, I was greeted with more of the same. The city was a wide open space, but still empty. What fills the world are either a combination of random swarms of enemies you combat with a subpar, unrealized magic system, and NPCs with mismatched voicework and little to no reason to care for them. This on top of the needlessly cluttered, unorganized spellbook make the game a chore, and all for ...

Normally I dont think graphics are the most important aspect of a video game. In this case they are so bad they actually detract from the experience. Absolutely atrocious. Games much older look a great deal better, Torchlight and Titan Quest pop to mind immediately. Time of Shadows cant even display correctly. In widescreen everything looks stretched and weird. In fullscreen everything looks squished and weird. Animations are horrible. Textures are chunky. The lighting is worse than Unreal and Quake 3. The gameplay itself is rotten. Abilities are unimpressive and its difficult to fight thanks to poor controls. Too many useless idiots filling up the screen. Plot and storytelling are lousy. Dialog is lame. Audio is poor quality. Stay away. Theres much better in the hack'n'slash genre. If you are super bored, go mow your lawn or take up flower arranging. This is just a waste of time.

Not a good game. A magic centric game seems like it could be of some appeal and this game doesn't do it well enough. There's no draw into the game, it's just dull and with no customization at all, it's hardly an RPG; so why does it advertise itself as one? Because it wants to sell, that's why. With muddy graphics, too few graphics options, poor controls, character classes that aren't fun to play, boring combat, crappy narrative... there's just too much to delve into what's wrong with this game, even for how little I played.

Monster swarms + unresponsive character = death, death, death. Crap game.

It's a fun game if you're not obsessed with the most modern graphics and gameplay styles. I haven't run into one before or since that has the sheer level of customization you can do with 'magic' type characters. Many systems have limited 'skill trees' where even if you can customize you only get two or three, or multiple different thing oppose each other, so you can't have both... Not at all the case with ToS. This spell does this thing when it's primary, and that thing when it's secondary, period, end of line. There's a limit of 32 levels for everything, but anything you get to 32, especially the area effects, are doing so much damage that very little can stand up to it. My one gripe with the game is it very much seems to encourage speccing into some kind of magic, and trying to do any sort of melee build doesn't work so well, unless you modify the game (cheat). If you do manage to do something like that, melee becomes unreasonably overpowered, almost like the game wasn't designed ...

the voice acting is up to the rest of the game's quality

Don't.