Every now and again you’re playing a video game and get a sense of nostalgia, maybe a glimpse into the games that forged the developer’s path. ROVE The Wanderer’s Tale, an Action RPG, felt very familiar in that way. My first thoughts were this game feels inspired by King’s Quest and The Bard’s Tale (2004). Turns out I wasn’t too far off. In looking at the developer’s website, Viron Games, developer Ronny Deicke states two of his inspirations for ROVE The Wanderer’s Tale are Monkey Island and Diablo, which feels appropriate for what I was witnessing.
Gameplay Elements
In ROVE The Wanderer’s Tale your character, known as the Wanderer, wakes up in a crypt coffin with no memory of who or where he is. However, the Wanderer hears a mysterious voice that is willing to guide him on his path through the crypt in this Action RPG with puzzle elements. The story is a bit facetious using humor to lighten the mood; hence my earlier reference to King’s Quest & Monkey Island. ROVE doesn’t hide the fact that you’re playing a video game and here for entertainment with jokes and various references to pop culture.
ROVE is played with an isometric camera view, inspired by one of the most famous RPG isometrics, Diablo. It’s effectively a dungeon crawler with typical fare that you’ll see in Action RPGs: experience leveling, skill leveling, crafting, chest loot drops, puzzle solving, et cetera. Since it’s more action-oriented, you’re able to use a controller and quickly dive out of the way of incoming attacks while traversing the environments. In terms of controlling the Wanderer, all of the inputs seemed responsive and it was fairly easy to pick up and play. Crafting was fairly simple yet added a bit of a puzzle element to pursue a quest, so a bit of a fun distraction.
Battles usually felt smooth with skills being the primary damage dealer to your enemies. They all appeared to be attached to a cooldown and could be individually leveled up by acquiring various crystal shards attached to elements. The leveling was fast and it felt as if your character was quickly getting stronger. I did run into some issues with skeleton enemies or mages getting stuck in place with a walking animation, which obviously isn’t ideal. It’s a game clearly still in development and we’ll just have to see if the bugs get worked out. Note that I did decide to do a second playthrough of the demo and I didn’t experience the enemies getting stuck in the exact same place (although there were other locations where enemies appeared to be stuck), so I suspect it’s highly dependent on where your Wanderer character is when first encountering them.
The loot drops in ROVE are definitely one of the more interesting aspects to the game. In my two playthroughs, I got a great variety of weapon and armor drops, all of which completely change the look of your character, which I LOVE. I’ve never been a fan of weapon and armor that merely change your stats. There was some impressive attention to detail here and I hope even more gets added as time goes on.
Graphics & Sound
I love the cell shading. I’m a sucker for it. You mix that with individual weapon and armor pieces that customize the look of your character and it’s hard for me to not at least give a game a look. Same goes for the game’s soundtrack. It seemed to be well thought out in the demo and had an engaging quality to it.
Conclusion
This is one of those titles where you don’t entirely know where it will end up, but you go “hmm interesting” and take note of it for the future. Yes, there are quirks that need to be ironed out in development but there’s a bit of charm to ROVE when you know what games the developer has used for inspiration, the various classics of the past. One can see what they’re going for here. There’s a bit of mystery to the story and some of the screenshots of various environments on the website do look pretty ambitious. Will Viron Games and Ron Deicke, the lead developer, be able to figure it all out? I don’t know but I hope that they do.
