Role playing games have come a long way since they were first introduced in the seventies and eighties with Dungeons and Dragons being the most famous of the class. Video games quickly adopted the genre with the Atari 2600s Adventure or the Apple II/Commodore Vic 20 favorite Zork to the current favorites of World of Warcraft, Everquest and Oblivion. The good folks at Pawleyscape have sent us a copy of their fantasy adventure FastCrawl. As someone who spent several hundreds of hours exploring the dungeons of Diablo 1 & 2, I felt well equipped to handle this review. Lets get started.
FastCrawl PC Game Review
Sponsor: Pawleyscape
Reviewed by: Tom Ratas
Tech Specs,Features or the Basic Info:
FastCrawl is a quick and highly re-playable fantasy role-playing game. You control a party of heroes exploring a dungeon on an epic quest. To succeed you must engage in exciting combat against many foes, find powerful items to help you on your quest, avoid fiendish traps, save another champion or two, specialize your characters’ abilities as they level, and carefully explore your surroundings… all in as little as thirty minutes.
Every time you play FastCrawl you will have a new game experience as you explore a different dungeon, lead a different party of heroes, face different monsters, and find different treasure. An intelligent game generation system will make sure that no two games are the same.
Play at the level of difficulty and duration of game that you wish; enjoy a leisurely thirty minute break in the game’s pleasant environments, or face insurmountable odds in an hour of nail-biting dungeon crawling action. The game is entirely turn based, so it can easily be played in the background and fits perfectly into your day.
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Installation, Testing and Comparison
Since Pawleyscape only sells directly from their website, there is no packaging to review. The download install file weighs in at 25 MB, so it should be a manageable download even on a dial up connection. The installer is simple. The only caveat is you need to have the Microsoft .Net Framework v1.1 or higher installed on your machine. Otherwise you will get this error message: "The application failed to initialize properly
The initial startup screen is pretty self explanatory. The Options tab will let you adjust the windows size, and audio volume. While the Play tab lets you adjust the difficulty and game length. There are four different difficulty levels and three different time lengths ranging from short (30 minutes) to long (about one hour). At the beginning of the game, FastCrawl allows the help and tutorial features to be toggled on and off.
Once you are ready to start hit Start to start your quest for glory honor. The game commences with a back story that differs each time you start a new game. The basic premise is the same, some evil entity is causing problems in the land and you and your group of four adventurers has to stop them by going into some form of labyrinth and kill the main villain.
You start out with a random group of adventurers, composed of various classes and number of party members. Each game has your party starting with the same base set of equipment. The screen is divided into three sections; the left hand panel is for inventory and player information, the bottom panels lists your characters and their health status and the main screen is the game map.
Installation, Testing and Comparison Continued:
On the main map, your party is represented on screen by a blue icon. Movement is done via point and clicking on the mouse. On the map you will come across treasure chests and ominous shadow icons which represent the monsters lurking in the lair. There are doors which are locked and can either be picked open or bashed down. Some rooms are booby trapped and can be deactivated by certain characters.
The combat window is divided into twelve positions. There are three melee and three ranged slots for each group. Your group controls the boxes on the left hand side of the screen and the enemy the right. Combat is turn based with the option of retreating individual characters or the entire party. The damage meted out is based on the weaponry carried and the special powers or enhancements accompanying the characters carrying them. Positioning of the characters is important since enemies in the front row must be eliminated before back row enemies can be reached, except with ranged weapons.
You can build up your character by drinking various potions found through out the dungeon and your characters level up when you go down to the next dungeon level. If youve played Diablo before, the game play as well as the sounds will be very familiar.
Summary:
At first play through of FastCrawl, I was underwhelmed. The game play and the situations were pretty pedestrian. If you played other quest adventure games, this game is pretty much similar to many others. The game play set for the shortest time was under a half hour. So it is a good adventure game if you want a quick fix and dont want to commit to a 60 hour tour in some dungeon.
After I realized this game is more of an arcade game than a true role playing type, I was able to enjoy it more. It will not make you forget World of Warcraft or Diablo, but for a quick adventuring fix, this game is pretty enjoyable.
DragonSteelMods gives Pawleyscapes FastCrawl a 3.5/5.
I would like to thank Pawleyscape for the chance to review FastCrawl and for their support of DSM.