Eukarion Tales: Origins

This is an extremely simplistic old Flash game. If you want to spend a few hours killing hordes of goblins and orcs by simply clicking once on each of them, it's perfect. By "few" I really mean it: part of my playing time has been spent AFK and for the rest, I dragged it on longer than needed. It's very easy. Towards the end I was feeling bored. There's only one shopkeeper, that will follow you for most of the game maps. It also doubles as the only source of lore and plot, beyond the kinda awkward introductory dialogue with your "master". The story is just as deep as the gameplay... or even less. The product page tries to sell it bigger than it is: it is very generic Medieval-ish Fantasy and the details are scarce at best. This shopkeeper sells the same items throughout the whole game. At first, you can ignore him/her/it because the enemies drop plenty of potions. Opening the inventory pauses the action and you can use from it as many potions as you wish. You will find what I consider the best melee weapon in the game very soon (one of the first "bosses" drops it). The best ranged weapon is as well dropped by an early boss. I never needed to buy a weapon from the shopkeeper. By level 9, you should be able to buy the strongest armor in the game (I was able to buy it before then but level 9 is the requirement to equip it). With that armor and the various rings and amulets you surely found along the way, and with reasonable stats and skills upgrades, from then on you are practically invincible. You will have little to no reason to buy anything else, beyond perhaps a couple better rings which seemingly aren't dropped by monsters nor found in chests. Speaking of stats and skills (called, respectively, Characteristics and Abilities), they are not explained in any way but it's nothing that anybody who ever played an RPG (or any other game with a similar stats system) should have problems with. A couple of them are seemingly useless. I think Intelligence increases the number of skill points you receive at level up, but I found no use for Knowledge (not even as a requirement). Magic Power also seems useless, since both magic scrolls and Special Abilities have, supposedly, fixed effects. The Special Abilities trees are in line with the rest. A lot of redundancy and very little imagination. There's elemental damage and elemental protection (also provided by various items), but how they weigh on the gameplay is unknown to me. I doubt they make much of a difference. You have two paths for Attack and two for Defence and in 15 levels you will have filled all of them. The only relevant element, IMO, is that many of them also cost Life to cast, other than Mana. At low levels, I risked more often to kill myself by casting a Special Ability than because of monsters. It also lacks aplenty in the enemies variety department: a few variations on "goblins" and "orcs / ogres", with goblins usually being the ranged units while the orcs / ogres are the melee units. Only exception is the final boss, which I will not spoil but don't keep your hopes too high. Both the "Maps" and "Guide" buttons send me to a "Page not found" on my browser. Not like you will actually feel the need of a map... A word of advice: except for bosses, monsters respawn every time you re-enter an area or load a saved game. When you load a saved game, you will also find that all of your bonuses from items are not being applied. To fix this, enter the inventory and unequip and re-equip any item. The game also has a few graphic glitches, and more than once you will find your sprite layered under some corpse or treasure chest. This said, the game is totally playable from start to end and runs very smoothly. Despite all of this, I am giving a positive review because the game is what it is. It is a true retro game, not a modern game made to look retro. I assume it was nothing great even when it was new. But it's free. It's recommended if you want a bit of that retro Flash game feeling and if you want to spend a couple hours by mindlessly clicking on the same enemies over and over. Oh, I almost forgot... Seemingly, you can't use the Steam screenshot function.