Silverfall: Earth Awakening

Years ago, I eyed up Silverfall, an isometric action roleplaying game developed by a now-defunct French company Monte Cristo, wondering whether I should buy it. I decided against it -- which was a smart decision because there are dozens of more interesting and entertaining titles in the genre out there, especially these days. However, last year I saw someone on my Steam friendlist pick up the game and its standalone expansion Earth Awakening -- most likely entirely for collection purposes -- while they were next to free on sale. Against my better judgment, I bought them too but with the intention of actually playing through them. (Don't do that.)

A Diablo-like better forgotten

Silverfall was released in 2007 (and its expansion in 2008). Diablo inspiration was to be expected but I could unfortunately see Sacred as well in how the map was set up as one huge open world. What I didn't expect was how the game doesn't play as much as a click-fest action game but more like Dungeon Siege with its leisure pace (also the short horizontal view distance). You can have up to two companions too though you get to affect their tactics only on a general level and skills not at all.

The game has not aged well: in addition to its low definition textures and polygon count, its interface does not scale up with resolution. I had to play it at 1366x768 on which text is still readable when stretched to fullscreen 1920x1080. Installing the game on Steam also has few quirks: You should first download Silverfall, followed up by Earth Awakening (which happens about instantly because they go into the same directory and Steam will think it's already done). After that you need to use Steam's verify file integrity feature on Earth Awakening which will get its actual files downloaded. You can then play through the original campaign and the expansion via Earth Awakening, which adds some improvements, I believe, like unlocking the camera from a fixed angle.

Silverfall's story is irrelevant and not interesting, as often is the case with isometric ARPGs. It might be worth mentioning though how nature and technology are pit against each other. I feel that was more common in the early 2000s -- you don't see it happening that much in games now. There are quests/decisions for both sides and you should pick one because trying to go for balance doesn't benefit you in any way.

I made an elf character and decided to go for nature and ranged combat which I thought a traditional and safe combination. Nature didn't turn out to be the correct choice however as its skill tree has about zero synergy with ranged while the technology tree would have had a good attack buff. Elf's passives at least seemed to work for any character.

I usually had unspent skill points, not knowing where to put them for actual benefit. I did eventually find use for all of them though. Crafting and enchanting take a lot of point investment to max out (also gold for the crafting) but it is a guaranteed way to get great weapons. Armor didn't seem to matter -- found pieces were good enough -- but weapons you do want to make. It's too bad though that they don't get glow effects on them.

As for my companions I picked the first two that one might come across: Morka the troll as a healer and Danselame, fist weapons dual-wielding elf as a damage dealer/tank. The setup worked well on Normal difficulty through the whole game although in Earth Awakening I had to take a little more care in where I positioned my character to not get hit by enemies' area-of-effect attacks. In the expansion enemies also tended run past Danselame more often to come after me.

One amusing quality control issue, at least in the English localization of the original campaign, is how your character's gender seemed to be completely random in written and spoken dialogue. You just never know what pronoun someone is going to use and it sometimes even created confusion when I couldn't tell who was being referred to.