DeathSpank

[Erkki]

Finished "The Bakoning". It was good, but I liked the first two games better. There was a lot of recycling going on in this one, and the structure of the game was boring-linear. The only thing making you go back from time to time was the arena.

[thorn]

I do not recommend this game.

Other than the short section in Valhalla, there was no puzzling. Almost all the game was repetitive pathways with ridiculous numbers of enemies. The sidequests were few and far between, and weren't particularly interesting. The main quests mostly sounded like sidequests; several times I looked at the quest log and thought to myself 'Why is that in the Main Quest section?' and didn't find out until after I'd completed it and discovered that the prize was, unexpectedly, the key that allowed me to move on forward. For instance, early on in the game

you enter a town and help the mayor to get elected. There is no reason given for why you need to help him get elected; he made no promises in advance for how he would help you, nothing about this connects to the overall plot and doing so certainly doesn't assist the downtrodden in any way. But when he does get elected, he finds among his new mayoral possessions the "Key to *A* City" which he, for no justifiable reason, gives to you. And that just happens to open the door to give you access to Z.I.M.O.N., who you wanted to meet.

It just feels like lazy Adventure Gamey plotting that expects you just to try everything and find out later why it was important.

The game pretty much has no plot. Each section is completely seperate from each other and it's terribly linear; there's none of the 'Gee, I'm not powerful enough to kill these enemies. I guess I'd better come back later' locations that existed in the previous games. Also , unlike Erkki, I really hated the Arena; the enemies are way overpowered even when they're at the same level as you, so you're pretty much just stocking up on the most expensive weapons and potions and hoping you can kill them before they kill you. I ran out of money towards the end of the game and just gave up on finishing the arena.

The major plotpoint FMVs are all the same but rerendered with a different colour thong. There are a few good laughs, but they're spread far and wide. All the characters and much of the scenery are ripped straight from the previous games and put in new situations that make little to no sense. Worst of all, there are some really gratuitous digs at Ron Gilbert, for instance a red herring that you carry in your inventory for the whole game and a terrible, terrible attempt at insult sword fighting.

All in all... it's not a bad game. It's just really, really lame and not a patch on the first two.

[Erkki]

Yeah, it did feel kind of lame at times. Also, maybe I remember the previous games wrong, but DeathSpank used to at least want to do good. In this game, when he is asked to do something evil (which seems to be way more often than not) he pretends he doesn't understand how it's evil.