Korgan

One of the free games available on Xbox is Korgan and it’s easy to see why. It’s a top-down dungeon crawler where you play as three tropes; warrior, mage and hunter, as you explore three different areas killing enemies and collecting stuff.

There’s not a lot to it other than that. The three characters have their individual skill sets and you quickly realise that the warrior, a go to for most games, is completely useless. The mage and hunter’s ranged attacks are much more effective and some enemies have shields that can’t be penetrated by the warrior’s attacks.

The gameplay is basic as well. There are two different kinds of attacks and it’s basically just smash your way through the levels completing the objectives and defeating the easy bosses which have repeated and predictable attack patterns.

Graphically, it leaves a lot to be desired. It’s again very basic in terms of looks and the environment rendering is terrible. What’s even more galling about this is that Korgan is billed as an episodic game and the first episode (the free game is the prologue) is priced in excess of £20. I don’t know how anyone thought that the prologue would advertise enough to convince people to shell out that much money for something this bad.

Musically, it’s forgettable. It tries to do that thing where it has appropriate adventure music but because the gameplay is so bad, it becomes irrelevant.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 11 Achievements

Playing through the prologue will net four of the achievements. Five if you complete all of the easy secondary objectives.

Some of the other achievements involve having to use the different characters. For some reason the hunter cannot see traps so there is an achievement for disarming them with the hunter. The mage can freeze enemies and there’s an achievement for killing ten frozen enemies. There’s also an achievement for killing ten enemies via any means and another for collecting 1,000 crystals which is the in-game currency.

There is a teleporter that allows you to travel back and forth between the different zones you visit and you have to use once for an achievement.

There is another non-achievement for dying ten times. Each character has its own health bar so you can avoid death by using health potions or switching characters. There is no real punishment for death though, as you level up from killing the monsters and monsters respawn if you die so you just get stronger with each death.

Downloadable Content – N/A for achievements

I’m glad I didn’t have to pay any money for Korgan. If it wasn’t free, I wouldn’t have bothered playing it and despite the fact the prologue can be ran through in less than three hours going slowly, it’s not worth the time to see what it’s like. If you like dungeon crawlers, there are far better games out there.