Game review: Depths of Peril (Demo)

Depths of Peril is a ambitious action-adventure game combining elements of hack and slash action, roleplaying-style character equipment and stat management, tower defense game's home outpost with defenses, factional real-time strategy, and a rich backstory narrative all with an explorable world. Depths of Peril was developed by Soldak Entertainment and is available to run on Windows and Mac PC platforms.

Summary of analysis
Poorly implemented new player experience, fast-paced and challenging gameplay with hordes of monsters, the lurking threat of factional warfare but the most frightening element is the narrative elements, complicated but rewarding interface and controls, well-detailed graphics with minor obstacles of object distinction, mediocre music with mostly satisfying sound effects.

Tutorial/New player experience
I imagine that the one thing that got me through this part of the game was an abundance of comparable game experience, the new player experience was bordering on painful.
After creating a character I was dropped into the game without a clue about the controls and considerable curiosity about what I was supposed to do first. Within the first ten minutes of gameplay, I was over my head with a long line of tutorial help windows waiting for my attention and in need of industrial machinery to deal with all the walls of text I was expected to read through. If you're new to this style of game, I recommend its competition first, they'll ease a player into the game much better than Depths of Peril does.
I can understand that there's a lot to teach the player as there's a lot to manage in the game and quite a bit of mechanics and interactions that they'll need to learn (kind of quickly, too, lest they fall behind the opposition), but more succinct explanations and walking a player through things is an art, not a chore list.

Gameplay experience
After getting the hang of everything, things ran much more smoothly, though the feeling of having to outrace impending doom never went away. Personally, I love being able to multi-task in a hardcore style game and managing a constant flow of quests, preparing for invasion from opposing forces, managing a main character and companion, and slaughtering hordes of monsters in exploration really let this game shine after the grueling new player experience. This game appears to be designed to keep a player going, unrelentingly, so keep an alarm handy if you have any upcoming plans while playing.
Probably the major detractor to ongoing gameplay are the tomes, which are an interesting read and show that the designers really wanted to draw players into the game's world, they're just cumbersome and out of place given the game's pacing and themes. If they could have implemented a telling of these narratives through high-level or epic quests in which the player character is transported back to participate in the events depicted, I would applaud the narrative, but they wound up being the most dreaded usable item a player would come across (whatever you do, don't right click the tomes... just stuff them in the bookshelf for their bonuses) and did more to break immersion than was really tolerable.

Interface & Controls
Complex interface relying on a sizable number of windows to manage (thankfully some of them pause gameplay while active). Primarily mouse-driven controls with abundant, and life-saving, keyboard hotkeys. It takes a significant investment of time to master the gameplay and the interface interactions, but it pays off exponentially with ongoing gameplay and especially in higher difficulty levels.

Graphics
2.5D top-down, angled, third-person perspective with moderately detailed character, object, and environment artwork. While certainly more visually appealing to a seriously-themed game, the interactive elements' graphics have a tendency to blend in with the non-interactive elements causing the targeting system to be an unnecessarily high level of nuisance (in fact, there's a whole keyboard hotkey just to highlight objects that can be picked up and it's probably going to be used more than any other). But even without the distraction-prone environment elements, a mouse-based targeting system in third-person perspective is clumsy at best. Thankfully, death by camera-angle or targeting system never became an issue (so far).

Music & Sound
I think there was background music, but between the rapid pace of gameplay and the sound effects, it may as well have been turned off for all I ever noticed it. The implementation of sound was quite a lot more satisfying, save that damnable knocking of factional management that honestly tempted me to embrace savage massacre of my in-game neighbors.

Commentary
Diablo-esque and it shows; the interface, controls, quite a lot of mechanics, and even some bits of narrative and premise illustrate a high likeliness of inspiration by the works of Blizzard Entertainment. There were also a number of moments where I felt the need to pause and question a few of the game's elements, such as a factionally-divided tribe of barbarians which somehow valued hefty (though abridged) tomes of lore in a hostile environment nearly pouring in on them from all sides. It was also a bit jarring to see the most-used currency was actually a coin-based economy as opposed to the frequently cited crystals of the tutorial and help windows.
To the game's credit, it was mostly well put together and it excels as a hardcore-style game by how it manages to keep a player engaged with only moments of downtime to give the player breathing and strategy time, eventually aiding in the desired player skill development rather than letting inventory management and spreadsheet-planning to detract from the pace.