You are Blackthorne, the last descendant of your family. It is up to you to save your whole race, since all the strong men have been captured by the evil lord. They are held as slaves, guarded by orcs and minotaurs, to forever work in the mines...
Seeing this enslavement as a no-good option for the future, your father and a bunch of wise people gather and summon you. They assure you that your quest is of the utmost importance, and sooner or later convince you. Armed with a trusty shotgun you shriek your battle cry. Let the killing begin!
Those filthy orcs (actually the same smelly ones that can be found in other Interplay/Blizzard games, such as warcraft) are relatively easy to kill off at the start, but soon become both tougher and greater in numbers. You might think now that this is just another run-of-the-mill shoot-em-up game, but seeing as this game both handles and looks very similar to older games such as Another World and Flashback, it isn't.
I settled down with this game in the hopes of a nice hour or so, and didn't expect much of it. Wrong as I was, I was unable to move away from it until many hours later, when I had managed to reach the last boss (now that is one rock-hard fella!). What first struck me were the really cool sounds, and the excellent, atmospheric music, which make a lot to enhance the feeling of playing this game. After that I was thrilled by the graphics, which are also a treat, and actually add a sense of realism to it all.
The controls are fairly simple and intuitive, and if you have ever played Flashback, you should have no trouble getting along with this. The game sports an excellent training level, where you get to practice everything from running and jumping to throwing bombs and firing your gun, all the time guided by some nice boys like you, except they don't have shotguns or cool sunglasses.
After that, you head on to the first level, and if you thought you could shoot everything that moves - you are wrong. As its predecessors, Blackthorne sports a fair bit of puzzling and thinking, which makes it last longer, and if you take the complexity of Flashback and exchange half of it with gunfiring, you're close to the truth.
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This is one game that has not been noticed by everyone, which is strange, considering what a good game it is. If you like platform games, shooting games or games that require a little thinking - or all of them - this is definitely one game for you. But mind you, the final boss is way harder than both Bowser and all of his armies tossed at you at the same time... |
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