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Baroque (PS2) | 
| From: Rising Star
Category: Video Games
List Price: £19.99
Buy New: £14.99
You Save: £5.00 (25%)
New (8) Used (1) from £11.45
Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 4120
Platform: Playstation2
Rating: To Be Announced
Media: Video Game
Operating System: Playstation 2
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.4 x 0.6
EAN: 5060102951117
ASIN: B0014FNQ42
Release Date: August 29, 2008
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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| Customer Reviews:
What's going on? October 19, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Have you ever played the bonus dungeon in one of those action RPGs (the ones with real time fighting) that you only get to play at the end of the game? You know, the kind with 99 floors that go down and down, getting progressively harder with no way of escaping unless you die and start again? Well, ladies and gentlemen, let me present Baroque. Because, to all intents and purposes, that is exactly what this game is.
With little advance warning or reviews to help me, I started this game with a sense of doubt. And for the first few hours, things did not go well. You begin with no preamble in a kind of wasted town, populated by a mere 6 or so...beings...who speak in riddles. A ghostly figure appears, offers you a gun and bids you to enter a tower and head for the bottom of it. Well there's nothing else to do, so in you go.
Once inside the tower, the gameplay begins. And this is what you do: Make your way through the rooms, which are scattered with random items and monsters. Kill everything on the way and look for a big purple circle on the ground which is the portal down to the next floor. Each portal you pass through offers you the chance to save - and once you are through you cannot return. So I played my way through a few rooms and got killed pretty fast. But this does not mean game over - each time you die you start again back in the outer town at level 1 again. And back into the tower you go, to do it all again. The game is cryptic to the point of irritating, and things really don't improve for quite a long time. The first time I finally made it through the tower, I rejoiced in the thought that now I was getting somewhere - but to my huge disappointment, I found myself back at the outer town again, all items lost, at level 1 again (!!), and with nothing else to do but go back in AGAIN! What on earth was going on?
Now if you decide to play Baroque, let me offer a bit of advice. First, play the first stage of the tower and come out of it. Next go straight to the training dungeon in town and play it (you can't do it before your first trip). It contains vital explanations about what the various items do, and how to fight, how to throw things and how to use things. Talk to everyone in town and then go in again. The training dungeon changes after trip 2, offering you a total of three different training experiences, so do them all. Apart from that I'm afraid you're on your own.
Depressingly, the tower is the same every time, with the exception being that it grows longer each time you make a successful playthrough. And therein lies the problem. Just surviving is not enough. The actions or set of circumstances required to unlock the new levels of the tower are all but impossible to work out. On your way through you will meet non-hostile characters who speak to you in riddles, seemingly requiring some action, item or response from you. This is the most confusing part of the game. When you meet these people, should you just stand and listen to what they have to say and move on? Give them an item? Attack them? There really is very little in the way of clues. And if you don't get it right, you are trapped in a loop of playing the same set of floors forever until you manage to do the right thing and make the next trip longer.
However, as time goes on and you get used to the game, the bewildering elements of it start to come together. Fighting becomes easier as you start to control your character and inventory of items better. Which is crucial because the enemies get tougher as the tower grows, and on later floors, there are tons of them and they can suround and defeat you in seconds if you are not careful and skilful. Although I have said that you must repeat the same trip every time, the floor layouts are random, so each trip is different. Item placement is also random, and you might find yourself overflowing with great weapons and healing items on one trip, and desperately short of anything useful on another. And of course, every time you die, it's back to the start with your character at level 1 again and everything lost (except the opened up new floors of course - you don't have to do the whole game in one long run - thank god!). Actually the save system is crucial. If you get through a few floors and make a mess of things, just die and start again. Conversely, if you have done several floors and are starting to get some really good items, save at every portal and reload the game when you die to ensure you reach the end. Beware of the auto resume feature - if you die or pass through a portal, the game always defaults to an option called "resume" which is neither save or reload - so if you die, "resume" means you go back to the start, and if passing through a portal, it means you now have to reach the portal at the end of the next, more difficult floor below before another chance to save comes up.
I honestly have to say that the game makes very little sense. And only halfway through did I realise that if you don't listen to what people are saying you are missing vital plot clues - annoyingly if you get button happy and attack them, they break off mid sentence and you don't hear the end of the speech. Grr!
There is definitely a significant amount of variety built into the gameplay in what is basically just a single dungeon, but you really need to give yourself a chance to get used to it before you start having fun. If battling through the same set of environments over and over again sounds like fun to you, then go for it. Otherwise, you'll need patience and a generous attitude to stick with this one. But it does improve as you become accustomed to its strange rules, and after a few hours I started to find it quite addictive, and eventually I really got into it. Because of the random floor layouts and massive amount of items, each trip through the tower is actually very different to the last.
But aside from that, when compared to other action RPGs in the market place, Baroque seems a very poor relation. Graphics are very simple and pretty flat. The human characters have unexpressive faces and no real depth. The enemies, however, are great! But is one dungeon, however randomized and changing, enough?
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