Publisher: Soldak Entertainment
Developer: Soldak Entertainment
System requirements: Windows 98/ME/2000/XP/Vista or Mac OS 10.4; 1.5 GHz Pentium IV (or AMD equivalent); 256MB RAM; 3D graphics card; 200MB of hard-drive space
Genre: Action RPG
Release date: Q1 2010

Wandering into a dark, dangerous dungeon might not always sound like the best idea. You get some crazy thoughts in your head when you’re at the dungeon entrance. Because you might never come back alive, you kick yourself for not talking to that hottie at the tavern last night. You tap your pouch a couple of times to remind yourself of the expensive health potions you purchased. You grip your short sword tighter because you thought the long sword cost too much. You feel the cold breeze through your cloth armor and curse at the monopoly prices the armorsmith charged back in town. Din’s Curse from Soldak Entertainment brings us another interesting dungeon-crawling action adventure RPG for the PC.

You were not a good person in your first life. You caused very bad things to happen to the people around you. Din, the champion of the gods, has decided to curse you with a second life in his service because of this. You must redeem yourself and build a reputation for helping others. Once you have done so, Din will grant you freedom from his curse.

Din’s Curse is a hack-and-slash action RPG, similar to Diablo. Your male or female character can be one of seven classes: Warrior, Rogue, Priest, Wizard, Ranger, Conjurer or Hybrid. Each class has three skill trees, except the Hybrid class; you can choose any two skill trees to make a Hybrid. The gameplay is typical for a dungeon-crawler, with a third-person view from above. Items looted from monsters or bought in town have different colors to show their rarity level.

In Din’s Curse you arrive in a town with an entrance to a randomly generated dungeon. You must do various quests to gain reputation for your good deeds. If you fail to complete missions in a certain time, they might come back to haunt you. For instance, if you are given a mission to kill a boss and if you don’t finish it fast enough, he will continue to send minions to destroy the town. If all the people in town are dead, then you lose. You must finish all the quests in each town that you visit. Once you get to higher levels, more challenging options such as hardcore and cursed mode become available. In hardcore mode, if your character dies, he or she stays dead forever; no more respawns. In cursed mode, you can only use cursed items that negatively affect one of your stats.

There is something about going into dungeons that always speaks to a gamer’s imagination. Most people in their right minds would never venture into a dark dungeon infested with hundreds of monsters. This is why we like playing dungeon-crawlers. Din’s Curse brings this kind of entertainment to PC gamers. The game, currently in beta, can satisfy your hunger for exploration and battle. I couldn’t get any multiplayer games up and running, but the single-player is fun. Din’s Curse is a game that RPG fans will enjoy.