Realms of Ancient War (PC) is a game in which the camera is placed at an isometric angle above the world, and you control your hero by clicking on a spot to make him or her go there. When you encounter enemies, you will frantically click on them to make your hero strike them. When you kill enemies, they often drop loot.
Does all this sound familiar? It certainly does to me. RAW is a game made in the vein of Diablo, and as with other such games (see: Torchlight), it can be difficult to, at a glance, differentiate between it and Diablo. Unlike Torchlight, however, RAW does not completely ape Diablo’s interface, and that’s a good start.
In RAW, you are a warrior (melee) or a rogue (melee and ranged) or a magic user (ranged) who gets swept up in a quest to try to free the body of a powerful entity who is stuck up in the heavens somewhere. The reason this needs doing is that The Continent is caught in a perpetual state of violence thanks to an event that had happened years before that corrupted the kings of the four realms, and maybe this entity can help put an end to that. In any case, the game does not give you a choice, so you just have to trust him.
The story is just an excuse to have you set off across The Continent, and it’s not unlikely that you’ll lose your hold on the plot rather quickly, as the story bits are rather few and far between.
What really makes RAW shine is not its story, though. In my first hour with this game, I earned a Steam achievement for slaughtering a thousand enemies. A thousand in an hour. You cannot walk five feet without running into some giant spiders or hairless monkey creatures or whatever sentient residents of the region of the world you’re currently grinding through. Combat comes hard, and it never stops. And I certainly appreciated that. This game is Diablo III on steroids.
There are a couple interface things I like more than Diablo III’s, too. One is that your potions (health and mana) are mapped to the 3 and 4 keys automatically, which is better than having to press Q for a health potion as I tended to keep my four left-hand fingers on 1, 2, 3 and 4 out of reflex. Another is that you really only need to worry about four abilities, which are mapped to the right and left mouse buttons and 1 and 2. Still, you’ll mostly be fighting with your mouse, unless you’re playing on a high difficulty and need your full arsenal.
Despite the fact that developer Wizarbox was probably not working with a Blizzard-sized budget on RAW, I would assert that this game actually looks better than Diablo III. On the other hand, though, this game does not feature voice acting outside of the occasional cutscene. But I always thought that voice acting in Diablo was a bit superfluous anyway. RAW’s story is certainly leaner than Diablo III’s, too, so the lack of voice did not bother me.
If you enjoy this type of clicky-clicky dungeon crawler, then you could do much worse than to pick up this $15 game on Steam. It’s fast and furious and very loot-heavy, and you will probably have a good time with it. But if you’ve always found Diablo to be rather uninteresting, RAW will not change your mind about the genre. This game is geared to a specific audience, and I doubt it will have much appeal beyond that group of people.
The Verdict
Realms of Ancient War: 3.5 out of 5 stars
