When I first start playing this I was strongly reminded of a single-player
World of Warcraft. Sure, your view is strictly limited to isometric top-down,
and it's themed for ancient Greece and Egypt – but the quest system, the
character attributes, inventory management, and fight system could have been
ported straight from WoW. This isn't a bad thing, but the comparison does
highlight the short-comings of this game.
The game is linear to the point of despair – sure, the maps in each area
of play are reasonably large, but it is always completely obvious where you have
to go next and any side quests you take up (and there aren't enough side-quests
by a long chalk!) generally just involve an extra 5 minutes of searching of the
current map area. Consequently the non-boss enemies you meet are dangerous only
in large numbers, because each area is pitched in difficultly to the exact level
you have reached once you get there. You don't encounter anything like
accidentally wandering out of Elwynn Forest into Darkshire when you're a level
5, only to run 30 seconds later being chased by a horde of venom spiders
10 levels higher than you … the point is that the sense of danger is almost
completely missing, and so anything other than a boss fight is routine, and
mainly an exercise in collecting loot.
On the subject of loot, the game does have one interesting feature, which is
that anything you see on a creature is a thing they will drop when you kill
them. This is a little less helpful than it sounds – you can't tell just by
looking at an item whether it is quality or just vendor trash, and let's face
it – you're going to kill everything you come across anyway, so who cares
what any particular one of them is wearing? Kudos for an interesting idea
though.
The graphics are gorgeous to look at for a game that's a few years old, and
even if the gameplay is repetitive it hasn't gotten boring yet, so at this price
point I'm happy to recommend it as a solid buy. If they had introduced a few
more side-quests and made the game world where you were free to wander
I wouldn't have hesitated to call it a classic.