It's a glorious blend of two genres you wouldn’t expect to mesh all that well, classic adventure and action RPG. A Diablo-style RPG from the man behind Monkey Island – and it’s got a name like Deathspank? Too good to be true, surely.Įxcept it is real, we’ve played it and it really does look to be as awesome as the pitch makes it sound – the action is just as slick as Diablo’s and the writing is sharp as you’d expect given Ron Gilbert’s back catalogue. If you didn’t keep your finger securely on the pulse of the games industry by reading bit-tech religiously every morning, noon and night, then you’d be forgiven for thinking that this game was part of an elaborate joke. If the idea of a hack-n-slash with its tongue firmly embedded in its cheek appeals to you, DeathSpank will prove a very worthwhile download indeed.Deathspank Hands-on Preview Platform: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 You can also encourage a friend to jump in co-operatively at any time. If it set out to be a cross between Diablo and Monkey Island, it succeeds admirably and, for a download game, it's about as meaty as they come (side-quests are plentiful, and EA reckons it contains roughly 15 hours of gameplay). Hero Cards let you choose which attributes to boost.ĭeathSpank is very much a straight-up game which doesn't bother inventing surprising new game mechanics, but keeps you amused with its quirky humour and proves surprisingly addictive thanks to simple but all-action gameplay. As you kill enemies and complete quests, you level up, gaining access to more effective armour and weapons, and improving your attributes. You have to pay attention to enemies, too, as if they are much higher level, they will make short work of you. Much quaffing of health-restoring potions or food is required, as it's easy to take damage. Well-timed blocks fill up your Justice Meter, which lets you launch powerful short-range attacks using a special Weapon of Justice – essential when you're beset by a gaggle of enemies. That gives you some idea of the game's whimsical humour, which will be pleasantly familiar to Monkey Island fans.ĭeathSpank's controls, in keeping with the rest of the game, are pretty straightforward – you can assign four different (ranged and melee) weapons, one to each button, and it's important to use the right trigger to block whenever you come under attack. The quests generally involving traversing enemy-filled areas in order to collect objects – your first step on the trail of the Artefact involves convincing Heybenstance the witch to free her hex on it, by bringing her a crystal shard from the Slime Pits, Red Demon Imps' Horns and Hair of the Pixies (which turn out to be plants). You play DeathSpank, a classic hero-type engaged on a quest for the not-very-illuminatingly-named Artefact – which involves interacting with non-aggressive characters and slaying vast swathes of enemies of all shapes and sizes, ranging from slug-like slime-blobs to big bosses. But since it emanates from the developer run by Ron Gilbert, of Monkey Island fame, it manages, perhaps uniquely, to marry its hack-n-slash gameplay with lashings of offbeat humour and deeply stylised cartoon visuals. A download title for Xbox Live Arcade and the PlayStation Network, it is essentially a hack-n-slash (with typical character-improving RPG elements). I f you're thinking that DeathSpank has to be this year's most strangely named game, you would be less than surprised to discovered that it is every bit as weird as it sounds.
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