Lethal RPG: War Review – Just Barely Mediocre

Lethal RPG: War is the newest game from EyeSpyda Games, a one man game development company run by Ben Webb, and is the latest in an apparently long line of Lethal games. In Lethal RPG: War, you take control of Lethal, a protagonist with black Super Saiyan hair, skulls on his black armor, and a buster sword one inch away from being DMCA'd by Cloud Strife, on his quest to save the world and perhaps become an original protagonist.

The art direction for the game is essentially a combination of your standard Flash games, with this reviewer's first thoughts being Sinjid and AdventureQuest. The characters range from the impressively generic to rejected fanfiction. The eight playable characters are what you expect from any fantasy RPG, and the enemies are about the same. Angry trees, mushrooms, rats, goblins, skeletons, dragons, and other stuff plucked from the list of cliches. The art is all very basic, and from looking through the oddly unprotected folders of graphical assets in the game directory, it doesn't get any more complex than a sprite sheet of overlapping body parts and an xml file to put them together.

A big problem is that, while playing and wondering how much hair concrete Lethal must use to keep his hair like that, you begin to notice the music repeating. There's about four minutes of music stretched out across the entire game, and eventually that 21 second boss music track is going to repeat enough times in battle to get on your nerves. The thirty seconds worth of sound effects to choose from offer a short relief, but it's not much. Normally sound isn't such a big problem to be mentioned in game reviews, and it wouldn't be here if there were more of it. What music that Lethal RPG has is uninspired and generic fantasy music, but if it didn't loop every fourty seconds it wouldn't be much of a problem. The experience is improved by turning off sound and playing your own music.

Lethal RPG allows you to mute it, thankfully. The options menu is as basic as they come, with only options for sound, music, fullscreen/windowed modes, and three difficulty selections. Still, it's not as if games like this require bloom and depth of field, so that's not so bad. Every menu has a question mark at the top left of it, which is the hint box. A lot of the time, however, there is no hint. It's hard to imagine needing hints to play Lethal RPG anyway, unless this is your first RPG.

The turn based gameplay of Lethal RPG can be described as both standard and boring. Perhaps a lifetime of playing mediocre RPGs has left me unable to stomach another, or perhaps the repeating music and dull characters have an attention destroying quality that can put someone to sleep, but playing through Lethal RPG is like crawling through molasses. It's a difficult, enveloping experience that only ends when you're so tired of the lack of fun that you would do anything to relieve it. When forced to play more, for instance when you need to review it but haven't played enough to feel confident in your decision, you come up with any form of excuse to procrastinate.

Outside of combat you can move around the world's thirteen areas and fight things, pick up chests, collect materials, and complete quests. If there were more to it than as a means of going from one boring encounter to the next, there may have been more to say. The environment art isn't bad. That's really all that can be said about it.

It's a struggle to come up with anything to say whatsoever, and not for lack of trying. Lethal RPG leaves so little of any impression on you that, once it closes, little memory of playing it remains. The strongest quality that can be attributed to it is its overwhelming aura of boredom. It's not completely bad, the art isn't horrible to look at, the story isn't awful, and what music is there isn't painful to listen to. The problem is that all of those things are boring. They make you want to stop playing, which is the exact opposite of what art, story, and music are supposed to do.

It costs $5 to purchase Lethal RPG: War, which seems far too much for what it provides. Perhaps it could be a solid purchase when 95% off on sale, but think very carefully before doing so. A better use for that $0.25 would be to buy one of those sticky hand toys from a quarter machine at a grocery store. I'm sure it would provide much more amusement.

This product was obtained for free by the developer/publisher for review purposes.