Sometimes, working overtime and trying to juggle adulting responsibilities, I get the need to play mindless video games. Diablo II was one of my entry games that would start a good era of gaming-as-a-hobby-slash-gaming-as-a-second-job. I could have gotten the Diablo III (D3) expansion as I’ve read it made D3 fun to play like D2 was. Or I could go through my library of bundle games and play R.A.W. Realms of Ancient War (RAW). For a hack-n-slash/aRPG/dungeon crawler, it’s not a bad game. It’s not a good game, either.

RAW’s environment assets and lighting are pretty. They’re nice to look at. The models (e.g., player character, enemies) are not as pretty, but they do their job. The animation sometimes gets choppy, but I think that is more due to axis coordinate bugs than rigging issues.

The audio sets up a good ambient environment. Some tracks remind me of D2, especially the dwarf zones which take place in a desert. I was a little disappointed some creativity wasn’t taken to break out of the middle-eastern inspired music (think snake-charming flutes, sounds evoking dry desert winds, etc.), but overall, not bad.

The game sets itself up in distinct chunks of play, rather than an open world with a home base. Almost each stage features a merchant somewhere so, in my case, I was running back and forth to sell off my loot. The 5 hour average to beat the game was probably around 7 for me.

There is something of a storyline. While finishing each stage advances the main quest line, there are sometimes subquests within a stage. The story itself is not anything spectacular. The world building is semi-interesting, enough to support the story, but ultimately forgettable. The dialogue felt cut short in some places, especially where persuasion was involved.

What really annoyed me were the odd bugs. I opted to play a barbarian so I could whack things and live with high probability. One of the first skills he’s got is a jump AoE which can be enhanced and deal fire damage when enough skill points are invested. In the first half or so of the game, it worked pretty well. Then it started getting weird. About a third of the time, my barbarian would get interrupted by a well-timed arrow or something. And I couldn’t figure out what stat would reduce interrupts.

Another annoying bit was when models would glitch. One was a larger mob that would patrol on some other coordinate plane than the rest of the world. I managed to take him down with AoE moves. I had to restart the level, though. One was when I was using the jump AoE skill and the coordinate math got confused and I’d end up in a spot my cursor definitely was not at. Usually this happened when my character was stuck in mobs.

The last one is the most annoying. When surrounded by mobs, I should be able to blast my way out as a barbarian. If not that, then jump out with my jump skill. However, my character would lock up and not do anything and of course that got me killed. Sometimes I could get around this by shift-attacking to force him to just swing his weapons until I upgraded that skill. Then that wouldn’t work any more.

Overall, for a hack-n-slash, it’s not bad. I think since it was short enough, it wasn’t like I was forcing myself to finish. There were points in the game where I wanted to do the next stage simply because I knew I’d level and I had some armor that had a higher level requirement. RAW is one of those games where character level corresponds to the stage. It can be really quick to level up in the first half of the stage, then the XP bar would slow down exponentially no matter how many mobs you killed or how many times you repeated the stage. However, I don’t see myself repeating the game with the other two classes.

A suggestion for improvement – explain the stats and what they do, especially when you have over 10 of them and it’s not clear that stamina does not actually affect HP.