Kick ass, pick up loot, repeat
The story is simple enough, you find yourself unconscious at the beach with a pixie flying around trying to wake you up. You learn your monastery has been attacked, and a demon gate opened. You need to seek out and find the powerful artifact Hand of God to destroy it.
The very same pixie becomes your cursor, lightning up the landscape as you move her around. Giving you more or less useful hints as you proceed into the game, in a dreadful Mickey Mouse voice that pretty much evaporates the atmosphere of the game. In general the voice acting is really poor, in fact they would almost be better off using the text-to-voice narrator in Windows. The other sound is quite good though, like music and general sound effects, so after a while you will forget about it.
At your own convenience you select not one, but two main classes for your character. Specializing in magic, figthing, bow and arrows, healing etc. Each class has its own skill tree where you can distribute skill points earned as you level up. The tree is quite feature rich, and you can customize your characters in many ways adding to the replayability to the game. I chose to play as a mage with healing abilities, and it worked out well. Focusing on fireballs on mana regeneration made my mage very powerful quickly, with the help of a lot of loot that is randomly distributed over the map. The game is quite easy to play, and its just a matter of patience to pass through the story.
As in Diablo there is a rich amount of magic items to be found. You can add rings, amulets, shields etc to your character, boosting your stats in various ways. Some items can only be used by some classes though. One annoyance is you have quite limited storage space for loot, so you need to sell it off frequently. Luckily you can use some special magic transportation stones to quickly teleport to a set of rune stones spread across the country at important locations. So, teleporting back to a merchant to sell of your stuff is a painless effort, although you will spend a hard to find teleporting stone each time so it is wise to minimize this way of traveling.
Fighting is easy and intuitive. You can assign the left, right and middle mousebutton to various spells or actions. Left mousebutton for close combat, right for long range combat like fireball and middle mousebutton for a healing spell for example. This configuration can be changed quickly at any time. I missed the ability to assign shortcut keys to spells though.
The graphics is quite good. You can see the grass wave in the wind or move as you pass through it, and animations are great as well. The monsters are quite varied in looking, and need different tactics for being defeated. The pixie lighting effect looks truly awesome in some places, due to dynamic shadows and rich bumpmapping.
One big drawback is the computer AI. The monsters are unbelievably stupid. You can kill off a guard next to another one with a long range weapon without any reaction from the remaining guard at all. And an encounter by a huge dragon that looks impressive and scary totally ruins the moment when it gets stuck due to poor pathfinding algorithms. Your enemies all behave like dumb cannon fodder just standing in line to be killed. So, after a while it becomes a bit repetitive. But, after all, mass murdering monsters and picking loot is what action RPGs are all about, so I'm not complaining.
The story is interesting enough to encourage you to go forward, and there are new monsters and land to be discovered. Finding loot and improving your character is addictive and it is hard to stop playing once you have forgiven the games flaws. Its a pretty short game though without many side quests, and unlike Diablo there are no randomly generated dungeons, so you probably wont replay it for a while after you are done.
All in all, it could have been much better, but as it stands it is an enjoyable and relaxing gaming experience.
Finally a warning about some technical issues. The game crashed on me on a few occasions in 64 bit Vista. It is forgivable usually until the first patch arrives, but two times the crash also killed my saved game, forcing me to start all over. This is really annoying, and I wish they had a game save system that was more secure.
Later I found the issue to be resolved by installing the latest nVidia drivers (177.79), which are considered to be in a beta state at this point.