Behemoth

General Recommendation: If you’re looking for a simple point-and-click combat you’ll enjoy this game, but if you’re looking for something more complex or engaging, it won’t be for you.
Preview: Can you defeat the behemoth and save the village?

=SPOILERS BELOW=

General notes:
This game has a simple premise, surrounded by just enough story and context to give the combat, the main purpose of the game, a narrative structure. It doesn’t claim to be anything more complex than what it is. The author’s tone is light and entertaining.
Playing as a warrior is pretty much just clicking random links until you win. You only have two attack options, and your special attack can only be used twice. There’s no real option for the player to develop a strategy. I killed the behemoth before my overdrive ever activated.
Playing as a mage requires a bit more thinking due to the increased amount of options, but not by much. It’s obvious after clicking each of the links once that the blizzard is always going to be the best option. In a more complex game, it would be nice to see different options be useful in different situations, such as being able to respond differently to the behemoth’s actions, and having some spells be more or less useful in some cases.
The thief path was a bit more interesting, due to the “scan” ability, which allows the player to put some thought into their actions.
The health potion/ether potion doesn’t do much, it just gives the player another set of resources partway through the combat. It breaks up the monotony, I suppose, but it doesn’t really have a point.

Grammar:
All good!
Mastery of Language:
Though simple, the writing is engaging and flavorful.

Mechanics & Coding:
They’re pretty simple, but they work.
-The health potion doesn’t work on the result of the fight page, which seems like an oversight.
-Having two seperate pages for the combat sequence seems unnecessary given that they’re both so short. It’d be easy to combine these into a single page and reduce the amount of link-clicking the player has to get through.
-Bug: I stole a mega blaster, but nothing appeared in my inventory.

Player Options/fair choice:
Pretty good, the consequences of actions are foreshadowed.

CONCLUSION: An interesting exercise in coding and combat mechanics, but not really a complete game on its own.

I'm not reviewing this game in the hopes that some author who was last seen on the site around 2007 is going to reappear and see it. But regardless of how unlikely it is that I think the writer of this will see my comment and improve on their work as a result, I feel that it's still worth it for anyone who may use this game as an example of how to manage a combat system in their own storygame- because this is exactly that, an example, an experiment with the variables, it seems.

So, the whole plot is that you need to defeat the Behemoth, of course. Nothing more, nothing less, and while that would be fine, I can't help but notice that even this basic, one-battle storygame is lacking in some places. It's extremely simple, regardless of which class you choose. No matter what, it's the same thing, just clicking the same link over and over and watching the variables change by around 30 each time. This got extremely boring extremely fast, and I can't say I had any fun with this, there's just not enough here for it to be an enjoyable storygame or even just an enjoyable game.

And so, it is with a heavy heart that I say I would not recommend this game to others, nor would I hope anyone uses it as a reference to try and build their own battle simulator. They would be much better off playing something like Delve, where the combat system is more complex, but it makes the gameplay so much more satisfying and rewarding.

But I don't want to judge this too harshly, as it is over a decade old, and I'm sure times were different at the time of its creation. I think that back in 2006 this would be regarded as a cool experiment and battle simulator, but I don't think it really holds any more value today.

Well, this was certainly more game than story by a rather large margin to say the least. There's really not much to say here, but I feel that the scripting is done rather well, making for an interesting battle simulation.

Since there isn't much in terms of story, would it be more fair for me to go about this comment in a more game-orientated manner? Because I think I'll do just that.

Difficulty wise, this really wasn't that challenging. I know this game is supposed to be rather simple and bare bones (as stated in the description) but I feel that maybe another harder enemy could have been added for players that finished the first battle. It's obvious that the creator of this game know his way around well enough in using scripting and variables to craft a decent battle. I found myself simply pressing one action repeatedly when my character was out of mana, and doing just that with the occasional different action was enough for me to topple the behemoth with much energy to spare.

Options, I feel that having more options in terms of attack would have made things more enjoyable. There seems to be a definite room for depth in selection here to make for a more dramatic battle, and I'm not saying by any means that this game required something like ten or twenty actions. I feel that even just five would have been enough to make this plenty of more fun.

I must say that despite its lack of depth, the fact that there's at least different classes to choose from was something that I found to be a welcome addition. And despite the repetition, this is something that shows that CYS games can be remarkable behold when the right variables and the like are put into place correctly.

I feel there's missed potential, but for a simple game and test of variables, this is okay.

5/8 - I enjoyed it

nice

It was a good fighting game, there are some fun parts.

very simple. I wish there was more of an adventure included, rather than just a combat game. oh well.

I would say it’s good, I mean
If your going for the classic RPG boss fight idea then I would say you mastered it, I’m very bad at it and haven’t beaten it though

Ok, but I can see why this was just a play around with variables. It'd be a good vidogame, though.

the game is very repetitive it is just attack, attack, attack there is no plan or strategy and one thing that could make the game more interesting is add a ranged attack and add different classes other than the three main classes
you could instead of having one tough creature you could have multiple weaker creatures and create a stronger connection with the character