Spells of Gold

PC review by James Frazer, published on Friday 21st May 2004

Oh dear god, another fantasy magical world RPG on the PC. Surely, after the king that is Diablo 2, the pretender that is Sacred and the card-playing online megathon Etherlords 2, can there be room for another title of the same genre? According to Oxygen Interactive there is, but I really am starting to doubt that many more games can just jump on the bandwagon with the same clichéd story and steal the gameplay from others that have failed before.

Now since I first started gaming, it was only fighting games and RPG titles that never appealed to me, the former with just two characters slugging it out bored the perjeebers out of mine self whilst the latter confused my delicate little mind. So some evil lord/wizard slips up in a summoning on some mountain somewhere, opens a portal/summons an evil monster or spirit whose power he can’t harness and so evil reigns down on the lands of what-not valley. Our character has a relative kidnapped/killed/turned into a hamster and exacts revenge on the lord/wizard that unleashed this mess, and so goes fourth to stop this tomfoolery. The first few times this storyline was used, gamers and journalists alike were totally gripped and would often play for hours to uncover the ending. Nowadays, this situation has been incorporated so many times that title can often sink away into obscurity and bargain bins within weeks of release. The fact of the matter is a once thrilling story has been fed to the cattle, and now the *beep* has hit the fan; we need originality in games, not just PC RPG titles. We are bored of chasing evil wizards up mountains, unleashing devastating magical attacks by clicking here and there and basically playing the same bloody story over and over and over again. The twist with Oxygens’ Spells of Gold is the trading aspect, in which you buy commonplace materials and items in one region (such as run-of-the-mill PC RPG games…) and sell them in another town or city, where they are deemed rare and so accommodate a high selling price.

Your character has a rather tragic history, in which he was an orphan adopted by a merchant. As a child you travelled the world with this guy and learnt key trading tips as well as how to fight. Now, however, the merchant is dead, and with a magical sack given to you after his demise you get underway. By that I mean walk around, as from the start your goal is undefined. Consider the starting point of ‘what the hell am I doing here?’ as first gear, and then don’t touch that gear stick for a few hours. That’s how Spells of Gold feels, you just can’t get out of the first gear to unleash your fury into the gaming world. This makes it hard to get into the frame of mind, you know, that feeling when you just let your instincts do the work whilst you let yourself float away with the atmosphere. Not here. As you progress, in a cautions one foot after the other style, the plot glimmers and flashes in and out of existence, meaning you stop to gather the information and then wonder what the hell it was all about. Stop and go- ask any Skoda driver; or any Spells of Gold fan for that matter. Trying to stay awake- let alone staying interested- in a plot that alternates from 20mph and a dead stop, hell even sometimes a slight reverse, is like shoving a handful of rice cakes into your mouth at 12-minute intervals.

Eventually you’ll discover that the world in which you play has a name, Vayon, and is just one part of previously connected worlds through portals called the Lokatrienn. Beyond these set of facts is very little to force players to carry on exploring the world. There are plenty of other worlds to unlock and trade to, thus making more money, but Spells of Gold seems to lose players by not giving us even the slightest of clues of what the hell to do. Am I supposed to be exploring the market of buying and selling, building up my financial side for things to come? Is there any reason to upgrade in my fighting skills when all I’m doing is travelling from one world to the other selling goods? And what will I do with all these attacking and defensive spells and gods to worship whilst counting my money?

For those who love undocumented storylines and building up their characters, Spells of Gold is probably for you. My first few hours of gameplay resided around wandering between the four available towns at the start fighting gnomes and delivering almost pointless parcels for the same level of cash an NHS nurse brings home. And that was about it. I could have experimented with the market, comapting cost and sale prices of items, but the sodding RPG element of getting attacked by gnomes and other short people got in the way and spilt my fun. So instead of bartering to become to uber merchant I had literally dreamed of (no, really) I was forced to have lessons in the art of protecting myself from midgets and dwarfs. Oh what fun.

On top of this confusing premise, indirect character development and a general mix-up of cross-genre mediocrity there is a magical and spiritual element, which allows you to pray to gods and learn spells. You can pray to one or a select group of gods to get different kinds of spells, and there are also schools present that will teach you fighting and elemental magic. Funny thing is, despite all this selection of spells, magic tricks and fighting styles, none of them seem to fit together to make Spells Of Gold ‘work’. It all feels loosely connected, like a piece of an Airfix model coating with glue in an attempt to make the thing stay in position. So fragile in fact, that sometimes you will think ‘why do I bother’. And when it comes down to that, you know the game isn’t for you.

And graphically, Spells of Gold reeks of averageness. You can see what each location is and what purpose a building has, but nothing has been done to make landmarks stand out. Think more of a slightly queer Statue of Liberty- “Oh, hello, I’m the statue of Liberty” than a low-pitched, beefy “I AM THE STATUE OF LIBERTY. ROAR!” Put simply, the graphics are more Julian Clairy than Frank Bruno. But in a glimmering display of charity, the menu interface and on-screen displays are quite well laid out. Submenus are left to sit well back and lurk in the shadows, identified by link buttons of the main screen. Items for sale, armour and the like are all readily available, so you aren’t left clicking round confused like a learner driver on Spaghetti Junction.

Spells of Gold is more of ‘what if’ than ‘look at this’, which is a shame really. Just as we thought there couldn’t possible be room for another RPG on the PC, Oxygen pop up with the idea of having a thriving world with fluctuating economics. Had we been given a central index of towns and their import and export prices then we may have been talking about a different game, but what is also needed is a stronger, more involving plot to keep the player interested and eager to get to the next step. Instead, just as you’re digging in to find the best sale prices, you become distracted by a whole other table of play opportunities involving RPG levelling-up and pinning down the plot. There have been efforts to make robust play structures come together, but with a deft hand for detail. The problem here is the different options of trading, levelling up and following a plot just don’t get along with each other, more of a row between neighbours on a street than a happy-go-lucky village. So in the end you just chase round each section as the game dictates it, meaning a frustrating and ultimately confusing time. Shame.