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Home >
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Video Games
> Results: Restricted Area
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by Michael Anderson
July 17, 2005
Fallout + Diablo = Success? Restricted Area tries to combine the two and fails.
Reviewed for PC.
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Restricted Area is the latest action role-playing game from a small European developer. In this case, it's from two-man German developer Master Creating. The story is a fairly typical but interesting post-apocalyptic cyberpunk tale. You choose one of four characters – archetypes matching a fighter, mage, ninja and rogue – with their own history and back-story. There is a whole story involving the fall of centralized government to the rise of factionalized mega-corporations, and how these companies have developed ‘personal modification systems', which are mainly illegal but are available on the streets. You enter the scene in the city ‘hub' area where, whatever your original character and motivation, you are destined to say the same lines in the same order as the other three characters over and over.
The game is best characterized as a clone of Diablo II. Restricted Area does not stray far from standard isometric action-RPG conventions used repeatedly over the past few years, and in general they work fairly well. There are a couple of quest givers – Smith and Jones – and other characters in the main hub area. Each has something that seems like a quest, but yields no experience or reward. Jones gives you the story quests, while Smith gives you the extra missions.
The presentation is good. Restricted Area looks and sounds beautiful. The soundtrack perfectly captures the environment and adds excitement to the exploration and combat. Also, the combat and spell effects are well done, as is the character development and skill tree.
There's a lot more bad about the game. My ‘Victoria' had some of the worst voice acting I'd ever heard in a game. There are numerous bugs. Some cause crashes, others cause unreachable quest goals, as well as one that had my ‘Victoria' being called ‘Jessica' by everyone for the second half of the game. Fortunately it didn't impact my ability to complete the game. Because of the crashing and save system described below, I kept ‘backup saves'. Once the game froze on me before it ‘completed' a quest, meaning the game knew I set explosives and got out, but not fully back to the city, so I could no longer end the quest by reloading. Fortunately I backed up my save right before setting off the explosives. Another bad thing is the balancing. In one case I went to Smith and took on a mission labeled ‘hard'. It was! I was facing very difficult monsters in large groups. But I persevered and beat the mission, gaining about four levels. I went back to Smith, and missions formerly labeled as ‘hard' were now ‘easy', and when I took one I was killing everything without taking damage, and getting a nominal 2 experience points for kills.
Pretty much everything else is lackluster. The game uses random dungeon generation, and it shows. Unlike the gorgeous areas in Dungeon Lords, these are bland, uninspired and not much fun. You just run around and kill everything. There are some obvious repeating structures, indicating limited randomization. It feels like there are three or four dungeon ‘types'. The journal, while adequate, assigns quests as either ‘complete' or ‘in progress', so there is no direct way to know what quest you are currently pursuing. But the desire to know that indicates how generic things are in the game. I also dislike the save system, which gives you one save per character, with no ‘quick-load', or other way to try again. If you die on a mission you lose a prestige point, and half of the quest reward. The prestige points impact your ability to get new ‘side-quests'. Finally, the combat is interesting in patches, but gets very tedious as you progress, especially due to balancing issues.
There is multiplayer, but it involves having a host computer and another player join into a co-op game of only non-story missions. There have been numerous reports of problems, but I was unable to test the multiplayer. Other than that, replayability comes through different characters, which I tested while playing Victoria. Johnson is the gun-oriented fighter, but since everyone needs to use guns, he was of little interest. Kenji is the melee fighter, which I thought would interest me, but didn't feel very different. Jessica had an interesting ability to enter ‘cyber-reality'. But even with Jessica, the areas were so drab and lifeless that there was no real excitement. So this ends up as a mildly interesting one-time play.
Restricted Area joins Dungeon Lords in the ‘great idea, messy execution' pile for the year. But while there is a better sense of completeness and polish in Restricted Area, Dungeon Lords is actually fun to play. Restricted Area suggests the Fallout games, but in execution is a very ordinary Diablo-styled action RPG. Fans looking for something interesting in that genre would be better served by playing Heretic Kingdoms: The Inquisition. For those really looking for a post-apocalyptic action RPG, wait until this comes down in price, as it is not rewarding as a full price purchase.
This game is rated M for language, violence and blood and gore. The blood and violence are there, and there is some language and sexual overtones, but in general the game is fairly generic and inoffensive. A mature teenager could handle the game without any issues.
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