Enclave Demo Review February 04, 2003 Jakub Wojnarowicz

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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.

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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.

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Graphics & Sound

With a 190MB download, we expected high-res textures and quality sounds, and for the most part we got them. There isn’t much in the way of music, or at least music worth noticing, but otherwise this demo really delivered the goods. The medieval-fantasy castle and town settings are really slick; the textures stand up nicely by themselves and when combined with the dynamic lighting give a very immersive experience. It may be a little hard to notice in the thick of combat, but during the respites between battles, it’s easy to appreciate the work that went into the world. The settings in the demo are a little limited in scope compared to the full game, by all accounts.

Characters are even more detailed than the game world. From the lowest grunt through the player characters, they show style and imagination in addition to good execution. Polygon counts are really enormous on them, and the animation is extremely fluid. There could be a few more motions per character per weapon, but given the variety of characters and weapons in the final game, the problem isn’t severe.

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Gameplay

The gameplay in the demo, as with Rune, is extremely simplistic: you run around like a chicken with its head cut off, and try to cut the heads off everything in your path! Well, the one difference is that you actually can’t dismember your foes like you could in Rune. Otherwise the analogy works perfectly.

The variety of characters and weapons do make up for any disappointments might feel at not being able to run around lopping heads and arms off. The demo is somewhat generous, with about three enemy characters per side to beat down. The Dark campaign has the player fighting against human foes, which leads to a lot of combat with enemies that are a variation on the basic soldier. The Light campaign sheds light on nicely designed enemies.

There are a few clever scripted sequences, but the independent AI actually seems quite poor. Enemies will routinely fall down any and all crevices large enough to hold them. The combat algorithms are ridiculously simple; melee attackers move in close and try to hack the player to bits, while ranged attackers hold position until forced to move. They don’t make use of cover at all, if attacked by ranged weapons (except the soldiers who use their shields), nor do they seem to co-operate very well.

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Big download

The hefty 190MB download is actually worth it for broadband users. The Enclave demo is a great way to kill an hour or two, and show off your l33t hardware. Unreal II is the only game that comes to mind which looks better than Enclave. Mindless melee action has never looked so good… played is another matter, but the candy is there!

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