"A furious action/RPG speed bump to keep you occupied for a while."

Sword-swinging, swashbuckling fun is the order of the day if you decide to draw sword and stand beside the impetuous young knight David and his comrades. The flamboyantly evil wizard Silver has invited David's beautiful wife Jennifer - as well as every other able-bodied woman in the realm - to his island, presumably to have one heck of a toga party. The women, of course, were escorted to Silver's medieval hot-spot by some rather unfriendly soldiers who made it quite clear that the men were NOT permitted to attend. Oh, by the by, these soldiers are lead by Silver's son Fuge, the arch-enemy of David's grandfather, an expert swordsman whose past is shrouded in mystery. Thus begins a crusade to recover eight magical orbs and overthrow a pimpin' wizard and the various incompetent sycophants that he has surrounded himself with. The real question is, of course, what could possibly make you eager to join this quest that at first glance appears to be yet another rehash of an old and tired theme? Fear not, lads and lasses; while this title might not be the most original or memorable to have graced the monitors of spoiled American children everywhere, it certainly contains enough innovative material to keep you interested for a week or so.

A Drowsing Tale of the Struggle Between Good and Evil
If you are especially perceptive, you might have realized from the introduction that Silver is merely a brush-up of a tried and true story rather than anything ground-breakingly new. It is, however, well-suited for Silver's beer-and-pretzles action RPG style of gameplay. The dialogue is kept short and sweet; you never have to wade through uninteresting repartee between your characters. The effects of this reduced dialogue are twofold: on the one hand, it gives your quest a sense of urgency, and gives the whole game a very fast-paced feel. On the other hand, character development and the overall credulity of some game events are sacrificed. While a few of your allies certainly have good reasons for joining your alter-ego, David, on his quest, many of them decide to leave their homes and throw themselves into terrible danger simply because you tell them to. As you may expect, David himself has the most speaking parts of all the characters, which was a glaring mistake: his personality is that of a brash, inexperienced youngster who knows it all and isn't going to listen to anyone that tells him otherwise. In short, he's obnoxious. It is too bad that your grandfather accompanies you for such a short time, because he is definitely the most entertaining of your crew.

In the grand scheme of things, however, Silver's weak story won't really detract from the average gamer's experience. The cheesiness that is evident in every plot twist made me think fondly of a Bruce Campbell movie, only this time, I was the star! You can't go wrong with that, now, can you?

Glitz, Glitter, and an Annoying Rotating Logo
Considering the age of this title, Silver's presentation absolutely shines. I had a low-end machine when the game was first released, and I never experienced a moment of in-game slowdown. One of the things that attracted me to Silver was that it delivered sparkling graphics strictly through software rendering in an age when developers were just starting to jump on the 3d-accelerated bandwagon, leaving cheap gamers like me to eat their Gouraud-shaded dust. The pre-rendered backgrounds are simply breathtaking, and are well-drawn enough so that you can almost always tell which areas of the screenrepresent an exit. Your motley crew of adventurers and the waves of opponents that dash themselves upon your unyielding blades are all pleasant to look at, although they appear blocky by today's standards. Spell effects are suitably spectacular, as are the huge, ugly, and universally angry boss monsters.

The music and sound hold their own as well. A momentous, rousing theme sets your blood to racing in the midst of a pitched battle atop a castle parapet, and then diminishes to a quiet, environmental theme as you meander through a serene forest or a snowy mountain road.The sounds of blades rending flesh and striking steel are all loud and disturbing enough for today's bloodthirsty youth, and even the voice acting is surprisingly well executed. The burly Jug speaks in a tough-as-nails rasp, the pensive artist Chiaro warbles at you in his musical voice, and the ravishing swordswoman Vivienne sounds as hot as a computer generated woman has ever sounded before.

Unfortunately, this quality does not come without a price. Silver is split into a bunch of pre-rendered locations that can roughly be described as ''rooms'', a-la Final Fantasy VII. Unfortunately, the game must spool the CD every time you enter a new locale, even if you've been there before. While the next region is loading, you get the dubious honor of staring at a rendition of the Silver logo that spins enthusiastically atop a black backdrop. I guarantee that you will spend a lot of time staring at that logo. It would have been nice to have a ''max install'' option that stored all of the game data on your hard drive to prevent this frequent lag.

The Mead and Potatoes
Of course, the majority of you are probably waiting for me to stop tooting my literary horn and get on with the important stuff already: namely, the gameplay. Barring a few exceptions, Silver delivers an intoxicating style of sword-and-sorcery mayhem that will addict all but the most picky gamers. Combat is simple: you can equip melee weapons, 8 flavours of magic, and both magical and non-magical projectile weapons on up to three characters that you take into battle with you. Melee combat is accomplished by clicking and dragging your mouse to execute different slashes and stabs (none of which would have a chance of connecting in a real swordfight). Magic and projectile weapons are launched at your opponents with ease. Selecting different weapons and items is accomplished through a ring menu taken straight from Secret of Mana. Hotkeys are provided to perform frequent tasks, but for some reason they are scattered all over the keyboard, making them inconvenient to use.

Controlling a single character using Silver's scheme is painless, and controlling two is manageable if you are fairly dextrous. Controlling all three characters with any kind of certainty becomes a trial, however, especially when you get to the later stages of the game where you have a dozen baddies charging at you under archer cover, and you're trying to break the charge with two of your characters while the third picks off the snipers. Once you actually engage in battle, the enemy AI is pretty good; good enough to wipe the floor with your computer-controlled allies, who play the defensive game to a fault. It would have been nice if the friendly AI was smart enough to execute a special move without you having to take control of a character first; it also would have been nice if there was some way to have your allies automatically heal themselves when their life starts to ebb. The most frustrating repercussion of the tangled party interface is that boss fights inevitably force you to sacrifice the lives of two of your characters to gain increased control of the third.

The other disappointment that is quickly encountered in boss battles is that they suffer from 8-bit syndrome: that is, they follow a predetermined pattern and they will not diverge from it, no matter what course the battle is taking. The trick to beating a boss is simply to learn its attack pattern. This is hardly acceptable, especially when decent AI programming is exhibited in the normal enemy troops. Fortunately, the majority of your time is spent crossing swords with the plebes, which is truly the most entertaining aspect of the game.

The RPG character-hacking types in the audience will not find much to tweak here. Your characters only gain levels after defeating a boss: you do not gain experience from defeating normal enemies. Each character follows a predetermined level progression, a progression that will usually keep you just strong enough to survive the next leg of your journey. The weapons have their own statistics and damage ratings, but each of your characters has a preferred weapon that they will do optimal damage with, no matter what characteristics the weapon has. In fact, the levelling system seems completely arbitrary and without purpose: it was probably included just to attract the large fanbase that the RPG genre has generated over the past couple of decades. A more serious flaw that affects game balance is the overwhelming superiority of melee weapons: while your mage and archer characters will frequently run out of mana or ammunition, your melee fighters are almost always extremely effective against the majority of your opponents. Magic is usually only required against bosses, and your archer, Sekune, can only be used as a novelty, since she is extremely expensive to keep armed.

For the most part, however, the gameplay is uncomplicated, blistering-fast, and just plain fun. The puzzles are frequent enough to provide a momentary distractions here and there, but are aren't complicated enough to interfere with the gameplay.

At Least It's Not the WWE
Silver is one of those games that is involved enough to keep you entertained for a couple of weeks before you move on to something else; rest assured that you will thoroughly enjoy those couple of weeks. It has practically no replay value unless you enjoy the combat enough to play through the game again: however, if you are looking for some good, mindless fun, do us all a favour by not relying on pro wrestling for your fix. And that's the bottom line...

Bah... you know the rest.

8/10

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 07/15/02, Updated 07/15/02