Review: Summoner

Reviewed By: Kirk Hiner

Review Date: August 27, 2001

Genre: RPG

Format: 2 CDs

Developer: Volition

Original Publisher: THQ

Mac Port: Graphic Simulations Corp.

Publisher: Graphic Simulations Corp.

System Requirements: 300MHz G3, OpenGL compliant 3D graphics acceleration card with 6MB VRAM, Mac OS 8.6, 800MB hard disk space, 64MB RAM, 8x CD ROM

Network Feature: Yes

3D Support: OpenGL

Mac OS X Compatible: No

Retail Price: $44.99

Availability: Out Now

Rating: Teen (blood and violence)

It's not hard for me to explain why I never got into Dungeons & Dragons. It's certainly not that I ran with the wrong crowd; many of my friends whiled away their weekends gathered around the rec room table, eating countless bags of Doritos and downing 2-litres of Mountain Dew well before skateboarders everywhere started to "do the Dew." These are the people with whom I ate lunch at school, suffered through the Highlander sequels, and even jammed in the garage (you haven't heard rock and roll until you've heard Shattered Image's cover of Sammy Hagar's "Eagles Fly."

Yet, for some reason, when the amps were turned off and the theater lights went down, I never followed the guys to the rec room. It's not that I was growing tired of my friends' company or felt their role-playing games were too geeky for me, but rather that I never got into sorcery and witchcraft. If D&D could've just been a guy running around with a sword fighting skeletons and giant lizards, that would've been fine. But the moment my party started talking about spells and potions and crap, I'd find myself more interested in yet another adventure of Connor MacLeod.

And that's bad.

Even amidst talk of yet another Highlander movie (no, I'm not making that up), my whole attitude towards sword and sorcery epics is about to change...and that's due entirely to GraphSim Entertainment's Summoner.

Summoner is an RPG that tells the story of Joseph, the predictably young hero who predictably has to fulfill his predictable destiny, predictably against his wishes. He bears the mark of the Summoner, after all, and this has put him on Orenia's Most Wanted List.

I'm not sure why 98% of all RPGs have to begin this way, perhaps because the other 2% never get published. Gotta know the target audience, I suppose. After watching the opening video sequence (told with great effect through narration and stylized paintings), I was all set to go into the living room and search digital cable for episodes of the Highlander cartoon. Luckily, the amazing graphics, great gameplay and involving story quickly catapulted Summoner out of its formulaic premise.

We'll talk graphics first, as their quality is the first element that gamers will notice. The full 3D characters are the type normally scene in action games such as Tomb Raider or Unreal Tournament, and the camera can be zoomed in on and out from them as in Myth. The camera can also be spun around at will, allowing the gamer to chose the best vantage point for each battle and for exploration. During conversations, the camera can be set to automatically zoom in for close-ups.

Still, whenever possible, I found myself keeping the camera zoomed all the way out. This is because I found it easier to control fights when I could see more of the battlefield, and because I wanted to see more of the gorgeous environments. Aside from being beautifully rendered, they were also artistically designed. The impossibly huge buildings and landscapes may not have been the most realistic I've seen, but that's not always the point. The fantastic environments are as big as my imagination when reading books such as The Lord of the Rings and The Dark Tower, and that rarely happens in games or even movies. The battles espeically contained many powerful visual effects, although the lightning spell did continuously hang my computer for a couple seconds. The lands in Summoner were beautiful to look at and fun to explore, which is good; there's a lot of exploring to be done.

We'll get to that in a moment. First, the gameplay. My problem with most computer RPGs is that the gamer has to control multiple characters. This is all well and good when walking around town or trading items, but it's annoying as sin during real-time battles. Usually, the AI of the non-player controlled characters is horrible, and switching between characters becomes so cumbersome that it's impossible to tell who's attacking and who's protecting. Not so in Summoner. The game gives you four possible characters to control, Joseph, Fleece, Rosalind and Jekhar, plus the summoned monster of your choice during particularly hairy battles (more on that later). Each has his/her own specialties over which the gamer has a good degree of control. Each can also be set to handle battles in a different way: melee, support, range, healer, caster, and a healer/caster combination. It was great to be able to control just Joseph while Jekhar helped up close, Fleece attacked from a safe distance with her crossbow, while Rosalind cast attack spells or healing spells, depending upon the condition of her fellow adventurers. It was on rare occasion that party members did something stupid, and was easily remedied by quickly taking control of that character long enough to get him/her in a better position.

Two other factors help out in battles. First, the enemies are often oblivious. Rosalind can be casting lighting spells within the same room as an enemy guard, but if he's not facing the action, he usually can't hear it, either. This makes it quite easy to fight enemies one at a time, often crucial to winning. Second, there's chaining. Although not new to RPGs, it was new to me, and I love it. During battles, a chain link appears above the head of your character when he/she attacks. Clicking the right mouse button while this chain link briefly appears on screen allows your character to attach another move before the opponent can respond. These chained attacks can reach up into the teens, allowing you to do plenty of damage before any can be inflicted upon your character. More importantly, it adds a greater degree of control over the battles, and that just makes them more fun to execute. Again, this can only be achieved because you can concentrate on one character and trust that the others can pretty much handle themselves.

And finally, we come to Summoner's greatest asset; it's story. Yes, it's contrived, but it's also well told. Joseph is a tragic hero, a man who's distaste for his past and his destiny is outweighed only by the dislike from those who must help him. Because of his unfortunate past, it seems that Joseph isn't the most popular guy on campus. Indeed, one of the only characters Joseph can trust has also vowed to kill him!

What's more, the story continues to throw out subplots well into the game, most of which help to drive the main story which has more twists and turns than the Caverns of Wolong (play the game, you'll get the reference). Some main plot elements were predictable (never trust a Prince), but others caught me completely off-guard (all that work to get those rings, and that was Joseph's reward?).

To make matters even more interesting, the game is constantly shuffling about the characters you can control. Just as I got used to fighting with four warriors, two were sent away and I was suddenly stuck with just Joseph and Fleece. Soon after that, Joseph was imprisoned and I was left alone with Fleece! This forces the player to constantly develop new strategies, so the battles never get old (except for those accursed forest encounters, of course).

The summons don't hurt either. Joseph's power, and the cause of all this unrest, is his ability to summon creatures to do his will...during battles, anyway. As Joseph's power grows, so does the power of his summoned demons that are vital to the succesfull completion of the game. Players can control these creatures as well, unless Joseph is killed in battle. At this point, they will turn on your group and must be defeated. Oh, and it's otherwise okay for Joseph to die from time to time. Resurrection is an easy spell to cast.

See? Spells. For the first time, I don't mind them. There are many that can be learned, but most can be relegated to party members, freeing up your character to hack away with a long sword, just as God intended. If you're more of a wizardry type, just take control of another character and have at it. With the right armor and weapons, Joseph should be fine without your assistance. Or, you could focus Joseph's skill points in a caster/healer direction. Fleece is more fun to control anyway...she has that cape.

I hope I'm not giving off the impression that the enemies are pushovers (the Four Riders wouldn't be so bad if you didn't have to fight them...multiple times...sometimes in pairs), but rather that the right balance between skill and strategy is not too hard to reach.

Although Summoner did have its problems, none of them were rating killers. I liked the ability to move around with the mouse and control the camera with the keyboard, but using the arrow keys for this placed everything uncomfortably to the right. Left handers, however, will be thrilled. Also, too many times I clicked near a character and accidentally selected him/her as opposed to just moving my current character to that spot. The clickable range for selecting characters was too large, yet some of the objects and NPCs (non-player characters) couldn't be selected with the cursor placed directly on top of them.

Summoner is one of those games to which I could devote an entire month's worth of reviews. Perhaps then I could've covered the music (decent enough), interface (very clean, but make sure you learn the keystroke commands for casting spells and such), and the requisite multiplayer features. But hey, I'm not much of a multiplayer kind of guy. With games like Summoner, you don't even need multiplayer options. The game is so big and so deep that finishing it having completed every quest and side quest can take months. And somehow, Summoner manages to hold interest for its duration. There's a lot to read and plenty to learn, but that's the requirement of good fiction, right?

If Dungeons and Dragons was as entertaining as Summoner, I may have to give my old friends a call and see if I can't finally join them on an adventure. I think I'll name my character Highlander, just so I won't have to worry about him getting killed off.

Again.

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