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Demo-lition

When the much-berated Enclave hit the PC in the form of a demo I had to download and try it. Not because I heard great things about the game, but because it seemed to be the spiritual successor to a personal favorite - Rune.

The premise to Enclave is that, of course, there’s a Big Gigantic War going on and of course it needs a hero, or in this case, hero or villain. That’s right – in an unusual and welcome twist, the player can try both sides of the game. Even the demo unlocks the Dark mission after the Light is finished. The full game has a dozen classes split evenly among the two sides – goblin, bombardier, lich, sorceress, assassin, berserker, engineer, knight, halfling, wizard, druid and huntress. Unfortunately the demo only allows players to take a spin in the knight for the Light side, and the assassin in the Dark mission.

Brute and nasty

Come at me

Thwack

Changes?

Some of the most common knocks on Enclave’s Xbox release were poor control options. The front-end is inexplicably keyboard-driven, a leftover legacy from the consoles no doubt. Fortunately the developers chose to include mouse support where it matters – in the game. The default control scheme work perfectly for us, and if somebody isn’t satisfied they do have the option of rebinding keys.

Another major front-end update is the inclusion of the vital graphics controls. Enclave’s graphics range from pretty damn spiffy at worst, to wow, if I had a girl to show this to, even she’d be impressed at best. Even at the highest detail levels with Quincunx FSAA and 8X ani at 800x600x32 the game ran at a good clip, about 30-40fps, which is more than enough for most singleplayer titles. This is on a relatively modest P4 2.0GHz (Willamette) with 512MB of DDR and a 4200 OTES card. At the lowest settings the game ran blazingly fast, much faster than Asheron’s Call 2, for comparison.

Push the cart

Watch the boom

Nail him from behind

Both options, while being a necessary part of the process in porting to PC, make Enclave more appealing than it was on the Xbox.