Drakensang: The Dark Eye Review
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Graphics Drakensang: The Dark Eye can't compete with the mainstream headliners when it comes to graphics, but it is a pretty good-looking game nonetheless. With the high-resolution pack enabled and graphic settings tweaked up, many of the environments in the game look absolutely gorgeous, of course helped a bit by the fact that you're usually looking at them from some distance, unless you opt to play much of the game keeping the camera fairly close (not recommended, for gameplay reasons).
Solid world design helps keep your surroundings looking interesting. While Drakensang actually does appear to reuse art assets pretty extensively, it manages to keep this fact fairly well-hidden from casual inspection. It mostly does this by refreshing the world design in every new area, sending you from a crowded city to a dense forest to murky swamps. The differences aren't huge - every area is still recognizably on Aventuria (TDE's setting), but they're enough to keep one interested. Character modeling and animations are not as solid as the world design, but they're still pretty good. Human body types consist of a fairly limited set of standards, but a rich variety in clothing, faces, and hair means you're not apt to actually notice any (sameness) in design. In both character and world design, Radon Labs dealt with their budget restrictions in very adroit ways.
If you're apt to notice anything, it's the odd face expression modeling and dialogue animating (more on this later), and an occasional half-hearted attempt to cover up graphical shortcomings with some bloom. A final thing to the detriment of an otherwise artistically well-designed title is a pretty unnecessary predilection to give almost every female an impressive bust, and cleavage shot to go along with it.
Sound & Music
There's not much to say on Drakensang's sound & music, beyond that it's solid. Sound effects and grunts in combat are a bit subdued but functional, equally the ambient sounds in the world are very subdued.
The music is more present, Drakensang having a fairly rich soundtrack with a different selection of tracks for situations and locations. It won't surprise you at any point, since nearly every track is of the fairly predictable type (to the point where walking in some caves had me imagining I was playing Gothic from the sound of it), but it's pretty good overall.
Setting
The setting of The Dark Eye, the continent of Aventuria on the world of Ethra, is an old one, having been enriched for nearly 25 years with added modules, world lore books, and novels. There's a lot to pick and choose from, but before it can appeal to us, the consumer, there's a bit of a mental barrier to cross.
Aventuria is not the recognizable standard high-fantasy fare, though it is deceptively close to it, and it is diametrically opposed to the currently popular (dark gritty fantasy) as visualized in The Witcher or Dragon Age: Origins. Instead, it is best described as (whimsical), a kind of mix of the standard high-fantasy settings as known from The Lord of the Rings and a more ebullient approach, close to fairy tales.
This is not the same thing as approaching everything with a sense of comedy and dismissive disinterest. TDE as a setting and Drakensang in itself have plenty of darker subplots and distinctly human motives of folly and evil, but it will easily come out of left field to approach a topic like murder or political scheming with a kind of light-hearted step, sometimes crossing the boundary and joking about it, which can be a bit jarring. One can criticize this approach wholesale, and if you're more purely into (dark 'n gritty), it will obviously not appeal to you. If you do take in the setting and it clicks with you, you can approach it with a new, if critical eye. Because while this setting might sound like a piece of cake to get through, it isn't. Beyond having to juggle a lot of setting details and canon as a designer, you have to constantly balance on the thin line of being whimsical or just being ridiculous, and have to ensure that your approach is consistent as not to jolt the player from embracing the game's world.
Does Radon Labs do this well? Yes, for the most part. There are a few moments in Drakensang that feel lightly out of place as you are faced with rather dramatic characters and situations (the first moments in Moorbridge marches, the elf in Tallon), but they are not so dramatic that they ruin the overall feel. NPCs remain identifiable individuals through the use of delightfully recognizable archetypes, without falling straight into the stereotypical, while the story design approach outside of the main quest has a fitting light-hearted approach for the vast majority of situations.
Aside from the approach, the main advantage to players in playing a game based on TDE is the richness of the setting. The difference between playing something based on an established IP and something just made up is often tangible even without being familiar with the IP, and that is the case for Drakensang. You can feel the pieces of the setting fit together better than they would for a new franchise, that the various gods' temples show up at the right places, that the cultural oddities of dwarves and elves (the latter you hardly meet as you mostly move through urbanized areas), while stereotypical, feel more like a consistent part of an overarching structure of cultures.
As part of the setting, this game offers a number of creatures and cultures, and there is certainly a feeling of the possibilities never running out, as every area offers new if often fantasy cliché enemies, such as undead, orcs, and goblins. Sadly, this is often given a light touch. Witches, aka Daughters of Satuaria, are a fairly interesting and unusual class in TDE, based on the archetypal women who do magic by being closer to nature, but deepened out from there. In Drakensang, they come across as just more women with a good bit of cleavage. The cave-dwelling grolms are shown feuding with dwarves, but it is never explored fully, and you're just left accepting it as a given. This feels like a poignant shortcoming for such a large game.
One noticeable bit of fan-service for those of us familiar with Aventuria is the appearance of a few familiar faces, such as the confused but brilliant Rakorium Muntagonus, or the studier of human nature, the druid Archon Megalon.
