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The Daily Click ::. Downloads ::. Review Review: Equin Adventures
Equin Adventures ... is a action oriented simple RPGish adventure game. It's main highlight is a randomized map that makes every time you play it - uniqe. Well... kind of 
You are a young, rabbit-headed huntsman, named Equin, whose brother was kidnaped by the oh-so-evil-and-dark Lord Kul. Your goal is to build up your stats and complete your gear by plundering the Black Woods and it's undergrounds, defeat three black knight guardians of Lord Kul, take three parts of a dreaded Shadowsword from them, assemble it, go to the "far north" via magical ruinstone and stick the said shadowsword up Lord Kul's dark n' evil backside. Quite a challenge, huh? Presentation: 7/10 The game was developed in Visual Basic 6. It runs in a small application window. It has customised save/load/new game/quit/map buttons and a funny mushroom-like cursor. The intro and outro are static pictures. A well implemented, but very basic interface. Not much to talk about. Gameplay: 8/10 Slaying monsters, collecting money, treasures and keys that you need to get into dungeons where you fight boss-monsters is actually all that this game offers. Yet somehow it manages to keep you put in front of your PC. The lack of alterable keyboard is a downfall. I almost broke my [space] key, while playing  Also the way that items don't ever respawn could be iritating - especially if you plundered half of the wood without saving even once... My fault again, one might say, but it still doesn't seem to fair.
Difficulty level is kind of unbalanced. It was harder for me to slay my first zombie (it took something around 7 tries) or the knights (countless tries!) than to defeat Lord Kul (first approach  ).
If you like dungeon crawlers, building stattistics and assembling legendary weaponry Equin Adventures will suit your tase as it suited mine. The basic gameplay makes it easy to start and the quick advancement makes it hard to quit the game once you start playing. It has that little somethng that makes you go "...aaaah, hell! Just a couple of minutes more...". Yes. It can be addictive. And that's the main basis to judge a games gameplay for me... Graphics: 7/10 Tile based, clear and coherent. But not a work of art. Equin is a well designed character. Animation however - is almost non-existant. The overall looks of the game is fine. But nothing more, I'm afraid. Sound and Music: 5/10 You can't turn them off!!! Seriously, this game would be better off without music, then with some of the in-game tunes. Short midi-loops (was that midi?) put together in a kind of random way. If it wasn't for the nice music in few locations (eg. Kul's dungeon), I'd say the music was horrible. The sounds are very basic. Kling, klong, bang. But you just have to hear some of the voices of the monsters! Ocasionall comments from Equin (usually "Great, you killed me!" directed to the player) are a nice touch. Lastability: 0/10 As I said before, EA features a random map generator. That's why exploring Black Woods is interesting even if you play for a second time. But many of the locations are predefined and they just shift around the map. So the randomness boosts the game's lastability, but not as much as one could hope. There were some moments when the game got very repetitive - like searching for secret ladders to the underground by bashing your sword against _hundreds_ of trees. That's something that takes away some lastability points... But it was kind of my fault - I didn't have a crystal ball. I think I could play Equin again in a couple of days. A week, perhaps
Overall: 8/10 It's going to look like I was inconsequent. I criticized hard on almost every single area of the game and now, I'm giving it 8 ouf of 10 in the overall score. Well, that's because the game is good. Very good even. I don't finish most of the games I start playing. I did finish EA, and it keept me hooked for hours. I was going to write an enthusiastic review, but than I thought, that Del Duio - the author - deserves some frank, constructive criticism. And let the overall score reflect my enthusiasm towards Equin Adventures. RECOMENDED!
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