Visually, the game is just short of gorgeous. The sorcerer lays beads of magic down that explode animate and inanimate objects the rogue performs a killer jump attack and the fighter smashes the ground in an all-out assault on close-up enemies. The special attacks are all unique to the character class. This powerful joint attack acts to wipe the screen like a giant earthquake, radiating from the epicenter out in a circle to flatten the trio's enemies. Each enemy also has a special meter that can be used to call upon their own special attacks, or when all three heroes have built up their attacks, they can use their combined efforts to perform a group attack. Players build up experience by attacking enemies, and with those points they can use them at the level's end in a shop-style menu to sift through the things they like or want to save up for. You can also perform get up attacks, blocks and counters to create depth on all fronts. It's still important to watch their health, but they're not instantly going to get pummeled. They're not terribly in danger of getting slaughtered, so you actually can have fun fighting as each one. The first impressive element I noticed is that once you've switched from, say, the fighter to the sorcerer, the two characters you've left behind handle themselves quite readily. By pressing a single button, players switch to any of the three campaigners whenever they want. The three-character system works surprisingly well. Zhai the rogue pulls off a mind-blowingly fast finisher, darting onto the back of an enemy from behind and sinking her dual short swords into his neck. There is a quick and a fierce attack, a shove and a fatal stab, the last one for when an enemy is stunned and on the ground. You can upgrade spells, armor and weapons, just like in D&D. Epps laughed at how many items there, saying there actually might be too many. Being the Forgotten Realms, Demon Stone is rich with D&D spells for the sorcerer, and hundreds, perhaps thousands of items for all three characters. Deeper into the game, players buy combos expanding their repertoire and building each of their characters with attacks, items, and spells. Players whip off single attacks by pressing face buttons, and the simplest of combos start off with double taps, followed by double taps plus another button, etc. Like Stormfront's Two Towers title, the control system is combo-based. The characters, which join together in a spontaneous fight, hardly know one another, and so as they progress through engagements, they quibble and even fight with one another. There is a story, but it's told primarily in cutscenes between levels and through conversation during the fights themselves (using the in-game engine). The team exemplified this by dropping the trio into a forested environment and instantly letting them hack into a pair of enemies. Stormfront felt strongly the cutscenes should be short and snappy, leading right into gameplay. As you can see from the eight-plus movies we've posted, the animations are rewarding, and the team's artists have created facial movement, lip synching, and smooth-looking body movement. Even at this point in development, the animations are incredibly quick as are the response times, so when you're hacking into a giant serpent, you get the satisfaction that you're indeed hacking through a giant serpent's reptilian neck. Each character - Rannek, the fighter Zhai, the Rogue and Illius, the sorcerer - has his or her own special powers, special attacks, and growth potential. Unlike The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone enables players to switch between any one of three characters freely and at any time during gameplay. Salvatore who helped flesh out a majority of the Forgotten Realms series and who penned most of the early novels based on the license, Stormfront Studios is digging deep into the D&D treasure chest of mythology to flesh out a game based on a three-character system. (You can also see our developer commentary here.) Working with well-known author R.A. Epps and Stormfront Studios' President Don Daglow last week to get a better look at the game's progress and we played through a handful of the missions to give you this full pre-E3 report. This single-player game is due this fall on PS2 (probably September), and we can now officially confirm, it's also on Xbox (most likely November). Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone is the company's newest effort, an action game sprinkled with RPG elements and based on the Dungeons and Dragons third edition offshoot, Forgotten Realms.
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