VR-1 has had a working relationship with Microsoft for a while now, so it’s no surprise that the company was showing off its own game at this year’s Gamestock. Its newest creation is Nightcaster, a fast action spell casting game that promises to give you full use of your double sticks while keeping your trigger fingers clicking at calorie-burning speeds.
You play Arran, a novice wizard who is battling an evil darkness that is overtaking his world. Using his magical powers, he must restore light to the world piece by piece, while conveniently kicking the butts of a nice selection of very American, sort of Wizard-of-Ozzish creatures of a variety of shapes and sizes. While the world is filled with fantasy environments and classical characters (they started off the demo in a port town, for god’s sake), the action is definitely on arcade fun rather than RPG adventure gaming. The key to Nightcaster comes in the control scheme, which has you controlling Arran’s movement with one analog stick, while controlling a magical orb with the other stick. The orb acts as a target for his attacks, allowing you to move Arran while aiming in a different direction, like a modern retake on Robotron. The buttons cycle you through a variety of spells at his disposal, ranging from fire and poison to electricity attacks, all of which have three levels of power you can use. By holding down the attack button you can charge up the strength of an attack to take out a wider range of enemies, or just get trigger happy and take out characters quickly by tapping off attacks.
It’s an easy scheme to pick up, and you’ll be getting lots of practice as you venture out of town and into one of the large environments featured in the game. The orb is always providing a visual target point for your spells, and allows you to concentrate of evading attacks, while still delivering a few hard hitting ones of your own. If you lose track of your precious orb, you can always hit one of the buttons to bring it back to your main staff. It also acts as a sort of makeshift camera control as well, pulling out the camera if you send the orb out a ways from your location, or bringing the camera into an almost 3D platform view if you leave it sitting on your staff.
As you progress through the game, you’ll be able to look for a wide variety of spells, hidden throughout the levels. Since this isn’t an adventure game, you don’t gain power by rising in levels, or by purchasing special powerups. The environments will be very familiar to anyone who’s played Gauntlet Legends, with fully 3D environments presented in a sort of 3D isometric view so that you can focus on the action, not on tweaking the camera. We had a chance to play around in the town and make our way through the countryside battling a few foes, before heading off into an ice fortress filled with bridges, dead ends, and tons of giant ice monsters and insects to keep us running, and firing. At the demo, there were actually some considerable problems trying to get the camera to face in the correct direction, but the developers promise that it’s something currently being worked on. I think it’s some law that all Xbox characters must have movable eyes, and Arran is no different. His face is full of details, and his cape constantly blows in the wind while he battles, creating some constant eye candy, when you’ve got the time to take notice. Even his boots are full of nice fur textures. The tiny touches are nice, and you’ll appreciate the gratuitously shiny metal of the ice boss, the amazing light effects of the green poison magic, or the stunning volcano that bursts from the ground when you use a level three fire spell. The art design leans on colorful characters and rounder faces than we Japanese trained console gamers have come to expect, with a distinctly non-threatening character-design philosophy. Little gnomes stand perched on what look like dodo birds, firing off poison or fire spells at you, and running around on fire if hit with their own attacks. Zombies will pop off their heads and play a little informal kickball if you allow them to hang out for a while before slaying them. Even the ice boss tends to come off as a giant Muppet more than a menacing entity, though you’d never say it out loud since he tends to loom about 80 feet over your head, breathe ice-breath, and carry a shiny axe with your name on it.
Nightcaster wasn’t demonstrated at the main presentation at Gamestock, and we’re not sure if that means that this title isn’t a priority for Microsoft or not, but nonetheless it was a nice surprise to check out at the show, either way. While it’s certainly not going to get the attention of deeper titles like Halo or Munch, it’s definitely filling another slot in the variety of titles Microsoft hopes to put together for launch.
The world of dwarves, dragons and magical powers has always been rather intriguing to the everyday chum. Movies based on it have traditionally sold well and games such as Gauntlet Legends and Diablo have always grossed a large number of sales. Microsoft looks to satiate that craving for the mystical world on the Xbox with Nightcaster, a action adventure game. You play Arran, a young apprentice forced to battle his way past legions of armies to extinguish the curse of eternal night which has been placed upon the world.
Although Nightcaster may seem like a plotless shoot ’em up in which a traveling nomad slaughters uninteresting creatures for no apparent reason, it is far from it. There will be plenty of NPC’s (non playable characters) for you to interact with, a handful of side quests as well as a intricately wound story. For those of you looking for a little something extra in your video game, Nightcaster looks to deliver as your character will actually age throughout the game. Starting out as an awkward teen and slowly maturing to a bonafide old fogy, if you’ll pardon the expression.
Nightcaster will feature a control scheme similar to that of Robotron, in that the left joystick will be used for positioning the character around the detailed world, and the right analog stick will be to aim your spells "spell orb". Each spell is powered by mana, which your character will progressively harvest. Spells fit under one of four categories: Light, Dark, Fire, and Water. Spells range from splitting the earth and enveloping enemies under the surface, to the ’everyday’ fireballs-ou-of-the-fingers routine.
There is also plenty of eye-candy to be found in NightCaster. Both excellent lighting and high-res textures typify this game and watching the spells in action will surely get any fantasy Zealot’s blood pumping. Lighting crashes down from the sky and the tears open underneath your foes feet with brilliant clarity and vibrant colors.
While the problematic camera needs some work, the controls seemed to hold up very well in the demo at Gamestock. The level’s detail seemed to pass all tests as did the intense action, which was done without a trace of slowdown no matter how grand the spell. Rest assured that we will have much more on this exciting title as it’s launch date of Holiday season 2001 quickly nears arrival.
