First, a little back-story.

Hazen the Dark Whispers was planned as the first episode in a much longer series of action RPG titles. Publisher Strategy First picked the game up and along with Dimensity, another action RPG title from developer Dagger Games, rereleased the titles.

Hazen found its way onto Steam few weeks back, billing itself as an episodic RPG with new content to be published regularly, which is a little rich, considering it’s been nearly a year and a half since the first game was released and nearly a year since there was even word that Dagger Games were still working on the title.

So let’s treat The Dark Whispers as a complete game rather than the episodic title it wanted to be. Being the first part of a cancelled series isn’t normally a big problem providing the title works as a standalone.

Skeletons, eveywhere...

Within a few minutes of starting Hazen, it’s readily apparent the game is a run of the mill, cookie cutter action RPG in the vein of Diablo 2 (Didn’t take long to get that reference in there!) and Torchlight. In fact, it shares more in common with Torchlight than D2 in its attempts to streamline the genre and reduce it to its base elements.

The main problem with Hazen is that where Torchlight simplified things with attention to detail and polish, Hazen feels very lazy. It doesn’t miss out any features of the genre at all; levelling, equipment, stats and relentless clicking are all readily included, but none of them feel like they haven’t been done better in many, many other titles.

A bigger problem is overall feel of the game, which isn’t helped by a weak control system which makes doing any ranged attacks far more difficult than it should be. In fact, it seems designed to make your character feel as slow and cumbersome as possible.

It often feels like your character is moving in treacle, which doesn’t make fighting a very thrilling experience. Slow and unresponsive mouse control adds to the problem so you’ll end up endlessly hitting “A” to auto attack groups of enemies while occasionally using skills or refilling health or mana from the starting village to the credits.

To complain about an action RPG not including ground breaking gameplay might seem unfair, but Hazen doesn’t just do things the same as other titles. It does them worse.

The story, normally thin on the ground for action RPGs, is virtually nonexistent. The player is dropped near some village with no explanation and the only brief explanation for what you’re doing comes from vague quest givers that (sometimes) point you in the right direction.

The story is one of the things the Action RPG can do better than an MMORPG, so why leave that out? Even Torchlight has more context and reasoning behind your actions, and I’ve seen more “roleplaying” in platform titles.

There are some things Hazen does quite well. Excluding the weird, star textured areas, the environments are more varied and interesting than the mines of Torchlight, though the game retains a very similar style.

It sticks closely to the look of World of Warcraft, right down to the yellow question and exclamation marks that have now seemingly become a standard for fantasy quest givers.

There’s also a nice variety of items and objects to find and use, even if the stats themselves are a little thin on the ground. You can mix up your character however you like by selecting different skills rather than a single class.

The use of weapons and armour is mostly limited by the three attributes in the game; Strength, Dexterity and Intelligence. The levelling and stats system isn’t bad; it’s just a little on the basic side.

A few months short of a release

At this point, what you’re left with is a less than average action RPG title that due to its episodic nature is far shorter than you might expect for the genre. It might still be worth a try for those salivating over the release of Diablo 3 though, if it wasn’t for the game crippling bugs.

In my time playing I suffered from multiple unexplained crashes on two different systems, a corrupted save file, animations not playing when they should, the AI refusing to move, sounds suddenly cutting out only to return a few minutes later and some completely terrible pathfinding.

Even loading up the game without a crash was quite hit and miss. Hazen really stretches the definition of the word “finished”.

Some games are worth fighting through bugs for, but Hazen is not one them.  There’s not likely to be any more episodes released or patches for the existing content, but even with fixes it would still be only a mediocre title that can’t compete with any number of recently released attempts in the genre.

Yes, it’s half the price of Torchlight, but it’s less than half the length and isn’t close to being even half the quality.

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Reviewed By: Rob