Harbinger tries to be like a sci-fi Diablo

Harbinger is a science fiction game set on a huge spaceship. It plays very much like Diablo and has some role playing elements, but is mostly just a click-and-shoot type game. I found it to be mildly entertaining and the premise was at least cool, but it has some bugs and other little glitches that should have been corrected for this to truly be a great game.

Like many games of this kind, you start by choose one of three character classes: Human, gladiator, or culbine. Humans are the average characters with a fairly balanced skill set. Gladiators are robots with improved fighting technique. Culbines are this game’s liking to a wizard and have some cool special powers. As your characters do jobs and make kills, they will earn experience points and eventually gain levels. With each new level, you can build up your attributes to increase your fighting abilities, health, and so on. Pretty standard RPG stuff there.

The game is played using the same overhead perspective as Diablo where you move using the mouse by clicking where you want to go. When combat occurs, which is often, you click on the target to attack. If you are using a range weapon, make sure to press and hold the shift key during your attack, otherwise your character will rush toward the enemy and be killed easily. I found the combat to the kind of frustrating with this game. The enemy units tend to move around a lot and the rush toward you, so almost every battle involves you having to keep running away and then attacking. It makes every fight take longer and is not very fun. In Diablo, sometimes you can run in swinging and take all the baddies out, but in this game you are always having to backpedal.

Most of the missions in this game are very basic. They usually involve going to find something for someone or to kill something. The levels are presented using a simple room-to-room design, and you occasionally run into doors and such. Without the doors, I think it would be impossible because all the enemies would come after you. The game is played by getting missions, then going out on them and returning when finished to collect your reward. Sometimes during a main mission you’ll receive a side quest, so that adds some variables to the game.

The weapon and armor systems in Harbinger are pretty cool, which helps. Your character can wear armor and helmets, plus get other special items to enhance offense and defense. Your weapons can also have add-ons which do bonus damage or increase accuracy. I like being able to modify the weapons, and I’ve noticed this aspect added to a lot of recent RPG’s such as the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic games.

As for the bugs and glitches that I think need to be fixed, one big one is inventory management. Having to stop the game to rearrange your inventory is a pain. For example, you will sometimes find large items that won’t fit until you move some things around or even drop them. Your character’s limited ability to carry more than a couple of large items means you’ll either be dropping a lot of stuff, or going back and forth to base to dump off things in a storage locker. Either way, this takes away from the game.

Another annoying thing is the interface in general. The mouse response seems to be too slow and there is no menu adjustment for changing this. I also don’t like having to hold down the shift key during combat. It would be better if I could map the right mouse button to where I could hold it down while clicking the left button. There just ought to be a better way to handle it. As it is, combat seems clumsy and overly difficult when it should not be.

The graphics in this game are pretty good by 2003’s standards, when it was released. I’d compare it to something you might see on the Xbox. Some of the animations are pretty cool, especially with the movement of machines and such. This game supports a max resolution of 1024x768 and doesn’t have very steep system requirements. My laptop runs it just fine with an AMD 2800+ and 768 megs of ram. The sound effects are pretty good as well and sound like something out of a spaceship with the little electronic motors. Your weapons also have distinct sounds.

All in all, Harbinger is not a bad game. I just think it could have been better. The interface is a bit clunky and the challenges are sometimes harder than they ought to be. Even so, it makes for a fun little diversion, but it’s not something I really got into like one of the Diablo series. Without any multiplayer capability, this is not a game you will play for very long.