Hexplore
- January 01, 2000 00:00 AM PST
Without any hype or advertising, this year-old marriage of Diablo's role-playing elements and Gauntlet's simple arcade butchery has stealthily crossed the Atlantic, just now becoming available to American gamers.
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Hexplore sends you on a quest for a mystical book with a party of four members-adventurer, archer, warrior, and magician. You slay monsters, collect weapons, and interact with NPCs just long enough for them to point the way to the next bunch of monsters. Your two-count 'em, two-stats are Hit Points and X.P. (Experience Points). Collecting X.P. will increase the damage your weapons do and increase your HP limit. Sound familiar? Good, because so will the rest of the game.
Fortunately, many of Hexplore's details are creative and interesting: the Glores juggle their knives, bored Guard Captains yawn, snow falls, lava bubbles, and flags wave in the air. The voxel engine manages to render all this quite smoothly, and although it's not 3D-polygon magic, it is handsome in a morning-after, retro sort of way. The well-done animated cut-scenes are a welcome reward for the plentiful bloodletting that precedes them, and older computers should have no trouble hustling those voxels right along.
The sound effects are top-notch, from the whistling winds and tweeting birds in the forests to the howls of the undead. In painful contrast is the voice-acting of the NPCs. In the hundreds of games I've played, I've never heard such poor voiceovers. Almost every one sounds as if it came from someone who just woke up and is unsure what it is they're reading.
While many gamers may be turned off by Hexplore's grainy graphics and its lack of traditional RPG elements, the game's solid and consistent hack-'n'-slash adventure will sustain those looking for simpler fare.
