Silver Review

Minimum:

- Pentium 166 or equivalent
- 32MB RAM
- DirectX (DX) Compatible Sound Card
- 200MB HD space
- 8x CD-ROM
- Windows 95/98
- 2MB VESA graphics card
- Keyboard and mouse
- DX Media and DX 6.1 (on CD)
 

The Alleged Story

The story of Silver takes place in the world of Jarrah, where an old geezer, coincidentally named Silver, rules Jarrah with his commanding army at his disposal.  Silver is an old man, who possesses a great amount of power.  He has a son, named Fuge, a great warrior, and a devastating force to be reckoned with.  His daughter, Glass is a very bright, beautiful, skilled witch.  Silver’s diabolical (yet intriguingly stupid) plan is to capture all of Jarrah’s babes, uh, women.  He shall then proceed to pick one who possesses great beauty, to marry him (though that is not the case when you are almost through the game).  He has an evil pact with a force stronger than him - Apocalypse.  Not much is known about Apocalypse early on in the game, other than the disturbing fact that he would be a powerful enemy to confront.

While in your beautiful home, your grandfather tells you to get your sword and shield inside the house.  As you do so, you tell your wife, with the slightest doubt of confidence, that this time you will finally beat your grandfather.  After getting the sword and shield from your lovely home, your grandfather teaches you some combat skills, which will come handy throughout the game.

While training with your grandfather, your wife, Jennifer takes a walk outside to go wash some clothes.  She does so, and the next thing you know, Fuge and his guards take your wife to be prisoner, along with the other babes, ahem, women.

You and your grandfather boldly chase after Fuge, but there is only one problem, Fuge left his men behind to see that you get your wish - in this case - death.  After fighting through hordes of guards, you are too late to save your wife or the other women.  You (David) must now find a way to save your wife from Silver’s evil wrath.

The Quest

After finding out that you are not the only one trying to save the women, the Oracle (near the Rebel camp) speaks to you.  In order to defeat Silver, you must gather eight magical orbs (Fire, Ice, Healing, Lightning, Earth, etc.) scattered throughout the world of Jarrah.  Each orb contains magical powers you can use to defeat the likes of Fuge and his men (though, in the end, they would be useless unless you find Silver’s source of power - oops, I said too much!).  You now know that there is hope after all, and your quest for vengeance will fuel you.

‘Pie’ menu

Silver’s in-game menu doesn’t look very intricate or unique.  It is very simple to use.  Within the ‘pie’ menu, there are eight different sub-menus.  To name a few:  Food, Magic, Shields, Special attacks (sub menus).  The use of the game’s menu was well thought of and quite original (though not quite unique).  Instead of having to go through a slew of never ending sub-menus just so you could equip Plastic armor on your character, you can easily equip or unequip a character with ease.

The Graphics

Silver sports some great graphics.  The backgrounds/graphics are very awe inspiring to see - they are among the best I have seen in a CRPG.  Silver looks a lot like Atlus’ Thousand Arms.   It is quite astonishing how a game not 3D accelerated at all can be so beautiful.  I was initially impressed about Silver’s graphics.  The game’s graphics are rich with detail and depth.  As said above, the game has one of the best looking graphics to date (RPG wise).

The Music

Silver’s in-game music is also very well done.  It sets the tone and mood for a certain scene within the game.  There is, however, a problem.  The game’s music is repetitively looped, which is bothersome to many gamers, especially me.  The music is very pleasant to hear, calm, and fits very well in the game world.  They are quite the music you’d want to hear from an RPG game.

The Sound

The game’s sound(s) were decent, though not really worth being recommended.  The sounds are quite believable, but nothing that will blow your socks off.  Some weapons in the game, when fired, sound very weak.  A good example of this is when firing your slinger/catapult.  It doesn’t sound good at all.  When your character(s) start using some of the more heavy weapons, they sound stronger, especially when your character dodges a sword aimed at them.  Nothing noteworthy here.

In-game Speech

I was intrigued that the game has some decent voice-acting.  Not really spectacular, since the game lacks some emotion where it is needed the most.  You might be surprised that all these are just really standard things to a CRPG game.  Above all, the dialogue is pretty linear, unlike FF7’s text only support.  There is an option in the game’s main menu to switch to Text, Speech, or both (Text & Speech).  Switch to Text mode if you can’t handle the emotional distress of the characters.

Character animations

There are over 50 characters you could talk to with in the game (50 male, 6 female).  The game warns you to be wary, since not all of them are friendly.  The main character is you, David.  You can ally with other characters only because they want to help you defeat Silver.  To be honest, I was quite surprised to see female characters in the game.  If you can recall, Silver ordered his army to capture all the women of Jarrah, so what gives?

The game’s characters are amazingly blocky (you can rarely see a characters face).  The characters severely lack emotion (when the voice is very serious), nonetheless the animations are quite smooth and flawless and work well with the backgrounds of the game.  The characters miss out on a lot of details, they are very simple and don’t have much polygons on them (be thankful they aren’t 2D sprites).

Each character has different motions when you leave them idle. ie; Cagen will float in the air and meditate.  David will be scratching his back, etc. The animations aren’t very spectacular to marvel at, but at least they are decent.

Gameplay

The game is quite simple and basic.  Beginners alike can learn (and beat) this game with ease.  In the beginning of the game, your grandfather teaches you some of the basic combat skills.  The only thing worth commenting would be the lack of training.  The game doesn’t teach you how to use magic, or magical weaponry.  Later on in the game, you will learn Special moves like:  Web of Death, Reaper, and Cleaver.  The game unfortunately does not tell you how to implement these deadly moves that your character will learn.  Another disturbing fact would be that no one in the game tells you that your magic can gain levels, instead you find out when you overuse a magic orb [to an extent].  Sadly, it is also not explained within the game when to know that a magical wand has been recharged, you are left to find out on your own.  (I found out that the magic orbs can also have special abilities.  Well, Geez.  Thanks for not telling me.)

Silver’s combat system is very unique in a sense.  Battles are handled in real-time, so instead of fighting enemies one by one, you can fight an entire army of them.  Generally, you use your mouse as a sword.  By doing different mouse motions, your character would do different swings with the sword.  For example, if you hold the CTRL key and swiftly move your mouse in an upward motion, your character will do a thrust attack, which deals a potent amount of damage.

The game gets harder and more difficult when you ally with other characters to aid your cause.  From a standpoint, the AI, when fighting battles, get tedious.  As you are hacking and slashing your way to beat enemies, your party members sit still and watch you.  Oh puh-leez.  Give me a break.  An enemy is beating the living hell out of you, and your party members can do nothing more than stand still, scratching their backs, sharpening their tools of destruction.  Although you can simultaneously choose all of your party members, by pressing the tilde (‘~’) key, you are still restricted to controlling only one at a time.  Controlling all your party members is not only a stressful job, but you tend to take better care of your party too much.  Your party members, when attacked, take way too long to respond to an attack - not a very responsive AI.  This is where the game takes a serious blow - the AI.

Sometimes it is very frustrating fighting when the view is obscured to a point where you can hardly see your character.

The problems are just beginning.

Instead of having the freedom to wander around, you are hopelessly stuck in a scripted game, where you follow events one by one.  I guess this is pretty demanding of me since the game has a simple storyline and a simple quest and that is to free the women and defeat Silver.  The game is not repetitive, which is quite a relief.  But there are problems:

While on your simple task to collect the magic orbs (it doesn’t get any simpler than that!) to supposedly end Silver’s reign of terror, you are always doing the same tasks over and over:

1) Go to an area of the game where there is a magic orb;
2) Hack and slash your way to get the orb;
3) Meet the guardian of the orb;
4) Level up;
5) Find another orb.

Interestingly enough, Infrogames does a great job of not making it repetitive (though the tasks are the same).  Infrogames has done a magnificent job of not entirely boring the player from these strenuous tasks.

I was quite annoyed that each time an area of the game is loaded, you waste a few seconds (depending on your CD speed) waiting for the area to load (a rotating logo of Silver shows this loading time).  I really wished that the game had an option for Full Install, since it would speed up the game tremendously.  At least The Duke (NPC) hands you a map of the world so that you don’t have to go through the same areas of the game that you’ve seen a hundred times before.  What a sigh of relief.

Another feature left off is the ability to save games whenever you want, instead you must battle your way to the next save point.  With the option left out, you are scared of dying and tend to handle situations carefully, I guess it is their way of preventing the overuse of saving games.  At least The Chronicler (the man you must talk to in order to save your game) does not say the same things over and over again, but I digress... sometimes The Chronicler would say the same thing again (he has the option to choose one of the four speeches he could say to you).

Above all these, the game is too short.  The game only took me 8-10 hours to beat.  For a game that had amazing graphics, great music and decent sound... this was not what I expected at all.  For the first time in my gaming career, I did not want this game to end so quickly, whereas playing other games I would be overjoyed to beat a game.  This is where Silver falls short on.  Perhaps Silver II could fix this.  There may yet be hope for this game...

Repetitive voices

After defeating Silver (and a cutscene), I was shocked that all the work I have done to defeat Silver would be useless.  Someone has been watching your every move.  Apocalypse shouts out that someone must pay for Silver’s death.  You teleport to another dimension to face Apocalypse.

After draining his energy down to zero (using the Falcon special really eased the job), he commandingly flies to the canter of the map and starts shooting fireballs.  After he shot two fireballs, he would diabolically laugh, then shoot two more fireballs, laugh, shoot, laugh.  It got too annoying, but what I was supposed to do about it?  Nothing.  Never before has a repetitive (more like a looped voice) voice enthralled me to take off my $50 headphones.  It was enough annoyance to administer a strong will to burn the game.  Thankfully, I was able to finish him off and end his misery.

Is there no end to these problems? The short and quick answer to that is no.  While the game is quite polished and very playable to a large extent, there are bugs.  As you know, there is no software out there that is bug-free.  I will explain some of these bugs.

There seems to be some problems relating to Microsoft’s latest drivers, DirectX 7.0.  The music and speech greatly suffer from this.  It continuously stutters with no hope of getting rid of it  To my dismay, I was forced to install the game’s DirectX 6.1 and DX Media.  The problem went away after installing them.  (I told myself that I was going to reinstall DX 7 after beating the game, which I did.)

The game suffers from crashes as well.  While at the Glass Temple, ready to face the guardian of the Earth magic, I loaded up the ‘pie’ menu and it crashed relentlessly with errors.  If I can remember correctly, the error had something to do with the menu performing an illegal operation.  Other crashes occur here and then, though they are rare. A bug I found was when Silver got angry at his supposed "elite" troops being defeated by fools (you and your party) when you make your way to the underworld city of Spires (cutscene).  After conquering Spires and doing other things in the game, I had to return to Thaddeus Tower to free the rebel prisoners (not the women), but I wasn’t sure where to go, so I hopped back into the submarine... all of a sudden it loads the same cutscene I’ve seen ages ago.

There are a slew of other bugs, which I will not further discuss.  You can perhaps say that the game is a benign tumor and when toyed around with, it would become cancerous and start doing horrific things to the game.  Heh.

Bottom Line

If you are looking for a great looking console style RPG game, then this game is definitely a must.  However, you’ll be baffled that you can beat the game in a matter of hours.  It’s not worth the money wasted on such a short (yet provocative) game.  A great reason to get Silver would be because of the music, and unmatched graphics.  Other than that, this game is not worth being recommended, since Silver would only be great for beginning RPG players.

Don’t let the game’s problems bother you, though.  These problems are very minor and does not cause the game to go in the trash.  This game is great, except the problems mentioned in the review. Before getting the full game, I must recommend that you must download the Silver demo to find out for yourself if this is a game that you would be interested in.

Pros:

Beautiful graphics
Great music
Above average voice acting
Learning the game is quite easy
Great game for beginners, veterans, etc.

Cons:

Too short
Repetitive music
Lack of emotion (where needed the most)
Game bugs
Load time on an area is annoying
Weak sounds
Lack of tutorials

By Terry "DysoN" Martin

<< Rating: 70 >>