Orcs & Elves

November 26,2007 - Developed by the genius John Carmack at id Software, Orcs & Elves is probably the best original mobile game. With their newfound ownership of the developer, Electronic Arts hopes to build on that success by porting the game to the Nintendo DS. Fountainhead Entertainment went ahead and added a few new levels and improvements to the gameplay, but is it enough to warrant a purchase on Nintendo's powerhouse handheld?

While silly, the game's story is actually quite intriguing. It opens up in a prison and the main protagonist is an elf investigating King Brahm's fortress. Equipped with you are a simpleton's sword and a wand that talks. While the wand is often helpful and gets you out of serious trouble, it's actually quite annoying. Think of it as the fairy in Zelda, except it doesn't yell, "Hey!" Anyway, the walls of the fortress are infested with all sorts of enemies, including giant rats, prisoners, and Orc henchmen.

The game is a dungeon crawler through and through, but it plays sort of like a lazy rail-shooter. All the action is in first person, and your movement is limited to only one space at a time. Due to the game's lack of visual prowess, at times you can get woozy or even feel claustrophobic with the little hallways you'll be venturing around in. When you end up in front of an enemy, you can use one of the face buttons or the action button on the touch screen to attack in. The combat is in real time, but it's also semi-turn-based because enemies will attack you immediately after you land a hit. In traditional RPG fashion, you earn experience and level up when killing the enemies. You can also pick up coins and healing potions on the ground.

The combat is straightforward and definitely simple, but it leaves boss battles--if you can call them boss battles--to be extremely pathetic. All you do is run around either chasing after or avoiding the enemy, and then you have the semi-turn-based attacks to deal with. They hit hard, so you'll have to retreat a lot and find potions on the ground.

What sets Orcs & Elves apart from many dungeon crawlers are the pretty interesting puzzles. A lot of them require you to go into little tunnels and find wise elves to give you combinations to certain locked doors or open new passageways for you to go into. It's troublesome to find the elven ghosts, but at least it adds some depth in the game.

Now since the game is on the Nintendo DS, we have to expect some expanded gameplay somewhere, right? Well, the developers came up with some new underground levels. There's a new purple burrow with ooze all over the place and bugs to fight. Whether or not that's exciting to you is your call. Also, the bartering dragon makes a return and now you can perform side quests to lighten her usual bad mood. In order to get superior items and weapons in the game, you have the barter them from the dragon and oftentimes the asking prices are a little high. Now you can adjust her mood through different quests to lower the costs, but if you offer a sum of money that isn't even close to what she's expecting--of course you can expect a snub.

The game's graphics are pretty much spot-on with the mobile counterparts. Of course, the game looks a lot better because of its expanded resolution and the developers went ahead and took the liberty of making the visual engine run at about 60 frames per second. Still, it's probably not good enough, especially with what we've seen this year out of games like Phantom Hourglass and Dementium: The Ward. It looks like Wolfmania on the PC, and that's not exactly a good thing.

The game's sound is a bit of a mixed bag. There isn't much sound in it at all. Not a lot of music, and there's a bunch of clichéd clanks of swords and the chirps of mice with a crackling fire torch. You can't expect much from a cell phone game.

At a measly 5 hours, Orcs & Elves is a short game that is meant to be beaten through brief sittings on the commute to work, school, or back home. But at its core, this isn't a game that's actually worth anybody's money. Sure, we have some improvements here and there, but this is a cell phone game. If you want a game that plays sluggishly, requires no skill and gives you motion sickness, this $30 cell phone game is for you.

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