Harbinger

"Another decent Diablo II clone doomed to failure."

The release of Diablo and Diablo II saw many clones: the good... the bad... the totally unplayable... the "o horrible I want to think it never existed". Also, due to the success of Diablo and Diablo II, the better clones never saw much of the sun and were doomed before they started. Harbinger is one such clone. To put it simply: take Diablo II, change the story, world, and era, but keep everything else. For more detail, read below.

SIDE NOTE: The reason I'm using Diablo II for comparisons is simply because the games are so similar I'd swear they were made by the same developers. It makes it easy to familiarize readers that have very likely seen or played Diablo II. Bracketed comments are Diablo II equivalences.

Storyline: 7/10
Basic story: You're a mercenary on the strongest known interstellar war ship, inhabited by multiple races, most hostile. The tyrannical leader of this ship is losing power to the multiple factions. Your job is to make a living.

Gameplay: 5/10
Very easy to learn, control, and play. Problem is the fact that it's been done already, over and over and over again.

There are three classes to choose from. Each class has its own equipment, some customizable, with multiple slots (body regions) that can be equipped. Each class has two attack modes and an additional special skill.
[Socketed weapons and armor, no skill progression, one attack is left-click, one is right-click]

Play is 100% linear with no backtracking capability once you leave an area and activate another. Items left behind for any reason are lost.

Character progression is experience-gain, level-based. Each level grants the character points to allocate to the four attributes. Health does not increase unless you allocate points to the Life attribute.
[Four stats determining energy levels, hit chance, and damage]

Inventory is a segmented box, and each item takes up so many segments. Items cannot be rotated to fill this space more efficiently. Thankfully, a stash (EZ Stash by name) is located in most areas with plenty of room to store loot until you can sell it. The stash space is handled exactly like the inventory, but with more room.
[Character inventory and stash]

Sound: 3/10
Voice acting, what little there is, is mediocre at best. Sometimes emotionless, others melodramatic, the game would've honestly been better without any at all, considering each time there's important speech, word boxes appear around the character, similar to word balloons in a comic strip. There's no ambient music, instead replaced with unimaginative machine noise you'd expect to hear in your mind while reading a sci-fi novel, and what music there is otherwise sounds similar. Sound effects (weapon sounds and door sounds, mostly) fit well and don't stand out enough to draw attention away from the actual game. If it weren't for the fact that enemies make a sound when they sight you and get ready to attack, you could play this game with no sound at all and see no difference.

Replay Value: 6/10
With three classes to play, you could try the game with each class once and get the same game each time, just a different feel due to class differences. Otherwise there's no real story difference between classes.

Developer Support: 1/10
I had to throw this in for one simple reason. When the game released there were major problems with one of the classes and scattered problems throughout the rest of the game, but it was playable. Two patches later, v1.10, fixed some of these problems, but in some ways made the class problem even worse. In addition, many graphics chipsets, including most mobile sets, will not work with this game at all: total black screen. The v1.10 patch, released in 2003 if I'm not mistaken, was the final patch. No further fixes have been released, and the patches are hard to find on the official website, if they're even there at all. If this ever changes, I will remove this mark, but considering the age of the game I doubt that will happen.

Overall: 4/10
This game is really only good for hardcore, "must play everything", gamers, or someone who's desperate for any form of difference in the games they play. With a little more advertising and a lot better development, this could've been a really good game, but, sadly, this isn't so.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 02/02/05