Black Element's official discussion forum

Cenega priest Joined: 27 Jul 2004 Posts: 13

Hi Everyone,

Now that Shade has been released to the public and you have had time to get to grips with it. We would like to invite you to spare a moment to give a short review of the game.

Share with us your feelings, we always welcome feedback so that when considering any future title our fans are a real part of that process from the very concept.

Thanks for taking the time

Wayne Meazza
Cenega Publishing

Demi-God Joined: 27 Jul 2004 Posts: 608 Location: Germany

First of all: It´s a wonderful game!!! Despite there were Doom 3 and Black Mirror a few weeks ago, Shade is my personal game of the year!!! Very Happy

Therefore i´m gonna complete the game today or tomorrow i may anticipate this conclusion.

The atmosphere grows from level to level. I´m pretty impressed by the level design. It is very intelligent and you don´t have to walk around for long times and don´t know what to do. I like the architecture very much, 4 different worlds with completely different architectures. I liked the medieval most, it has the most "fantasy" and that´s what i like. The savepoints are placed VERY fair, so i don´t miss the quicksave button.

A little surprising was the sequence in the swamps, were you drown without warning sometimes. This was the only thing that made me curse. Wink

I´m so much looking forward to another Shade(-like) game, and/or a mission pack. Shade showed the great talent and the efforts of Black Element, so there have to come more games from them. They proved that there can be wonderful games without creating big hypes before. Since Nefandus i was interested in Shade, but the game exceeded my expections by far!!!

[edit]
I just finished the game!!! I´m highly enthusiastic!

Some points i forgot above:
- I like the soundtrack very much!
- The fight/combosystem is great, easy-to-use and mighty.
- The whole graphics are very nice and full of atmosphere.
- Not one single crash, it runs very stable (what is important if there is no quicksave!)

If you ask me what to improve, here are my points:
- Some puzzles could be a bit more tricky. They don´t have to be very hard - just a bit. There were very good ones, but some were too easy. Example: The clock-puzzle was very good (it took me some minutes), but the answer should be in another room (maybe the room before), not in the same.
- I like "breathing" environments - birds flying around, butterflies, sound of the wind, singing birds, howling wolves and things like that. This makes my step into the world more intensive. Some of these elements were in the game, but should be more, in my opinion.

It was hard to find these points cause this game is awesome. I hope you are currently working on new missions/new game. Very Happy

[/edit]
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"Sunny, bite the head off that elf!"

Zombie Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 6

Well this may not be much of a review, more of a what it needs to improve on... Well first things first. You said that you didnt want to make the game complex for casual players, but its pretty hard and pretty much the olny way to beat it is trial and error... you need to fix this.
The second thing is that the fighting system is just not good enough for the amont of action. I also belive some harder puzzles and riddles would be great. Now my main problem is that everything that happens is just to expected. Nothing scared me or suprised me so far and I want to be scared more then in just the cut scenes. Now I realize you are just doing you best but these would improve yours games greatly. By the way concept but it needs to be improved. Now what we need is a scary horro/action/platformer thats on par with Resident evil (Hopefully better and maybe if Resident evil 4 turns out as I expected you may have some competion).

The game is great, it was not too hard, at some points it wasn’t hard at all. The atmosphere is great; graphics are almost perfect (the only thing is that sometimes on the stairways NPC’s when they die they float horizontally in the air).

The sound track in the main window is great, I wish there was an mp3 version that we could download. The music and the sounds during the game are professionally done and composed, and become one with the background during the game, so it doesn’t get in the way.

The storyline is interesting and does not repeat itself. It keeps you wanting play more and more. The puzzles are not that difficult, some more of a time taking, they don’t keep you in the same place for a long time thus let you enjoy the game more.

The NPC’s are good to fight, and the quantity of them attacking the Player at the same time sometimes is interesting. The different types of NPC’s, levels and weapons that a Player can pick up and fight with are well worked on, each weapon has it’s own speed and movement, and also the effect!

There is one thing that I am confused with, is the ending, when you defeat the Demon. Everything else is well done! My thumbs up and Cheers to the Developers and everyone who worked on the game.

If I were to give the score out of 5 stars I would give all 5! * * * * *

Skeleton warrior Joined: 08 Jan 2005 Posts: 35

Without reading any of the reviews here, here is my review:

http://www.thecrawdaddypage.com/reviewsB/shade.html

My host is having problems right now (has been for the last three days) so the link might take a long time to activate, or a couple of clicks to get it to work at all. Hopefully things will be straightened out in a couple of days.

Demi-God Joined: 27 Jul 2004 Posts: 608 Location: Germany

Skeleton warrior Joined: 08 Jan 2005 Posts: 35

Demi-God Joined: 27 Jul 2004 Posts: 608 Location: Germany

Thanks for your impressions. Very Happy

You´re right - when i played BoD i also realized these fantastic shadows. And after playing Shade i´m very hot for another game in that style. So believe me...i still have some games to play in the near future (Moment of Silence, Scrapland, actually Half-Life 2) - but as soon as possible i´m gonna reinstall BoD. Smile

btw, what happend to Rebelact (the developer)?

Maybe we should talk about it via PM - it´s too off-topic. Wink

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"Sunny, bite the head off that elf!"

Daemon Joined: 08 Oct 2004 Posts: 253 Location: Germany

I only have the German version of BoD... after installing it, I realized the translation sucked (they actually translated "key" - like in keyboard - with "Schlüssel"; ends up "Drücken sie Schlüssel E, um Schalter umzulegen" Sad

) and haven´t given it another look since. But I played Die by the Sword for quite some time, the swordsplay ruled.

Demi-God Joined: 26 Jul 2004 Posts: 591

Crawdaddy: good job! Smile

wogi: RebelAct is no more... :/

Skeleton Joined: 14 Nov 2004 Posts: 11

Wogi,

Many of the people that made BoD are now at Mercury Steam- developers of Scrapland... Cool

More info here

Crawdaddy, that's an awesome review of Shade!

Demi-God Joined: 27 Jul 2004 Posts: 608 Location: Germany

Lesser zombie Joined: 17 May 2005 Posts: 1

New poster here, and I just downloaded the demo, in hopes of finding a game style I'm looking for, and I have a serious question for the developers and the gaming community in general...

Why are all single player games of this style created the same? I'm a rabid MMORP player, but I play probably 99% of the content solo. What I like about those games that I have yet to find in a single player game is a decent, user friendly GUI. What I'm specifically looking for is a mouse pointer. Why are all these games made with permanent mouse look? It's frustrating in the extreme. I want to be able to interact with the world, not bump into every object to see if there is something there.

Related to the mouse look issue is the absence of keyboard commands to turn. They are always strafe keys rather than turn keys, because presumably, you're using the mouse to turn with.

My question to the community is: is there a game that plays like a mmorpg but has the depth and survivability of a sprpg?

Thanks.

BTW, while i liked the look of your game, I could only play it to the point where you open your first door. A mouse pointer is that important to me.

Theo

Skeleton warrior Joined: 08 Jan 2005 Posts: 35

I know you probably wont be back to read this, but I think a game that follows your description is one called Mistmare.

I do not suggest you get it, though as it's a right bit horribly made and near impossible to play.

They used the Lithtech engine to make it and it doesn't work very well.. You get stuck in objects all the time and things s l o w down after about ten minutes of play due to a memory leak.

The story and general idea of the game is good.. Just the talent of the team that made it had everything to do with designing a game, but little to do with making one.

Skeleton Joined: 19 Oct 2005 Posts: 11 Location: Pakistan

A heck of a game. Extreme horror, beautiful art work. I second all the +ves discussed in the 2nd post.

The 2 things which I didnt like are:

1) The face of the hero
2) Extreme tragic end