Iesabel Review

Developer: Forever Entertainment
Price: $1.99
Version Reviewed: 1.03
Device Reviewed On: iPhone 4S

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[rating:overall]

Action RPGs, particularly dungeon crawlers, can sometimes get away with being a little generic. Their premises and worlds can be little more than excuses for players to hack, slash, and grind to their heart’s content. Iesabel gets that part right, the most important part. But even still, it’s hard to ignore what it does wrong.

As told in an impressively animated and voice-acted opening cutscene, Iesabel tells the story of a group of heroes brought together by a powerful shaman to fight the approaching, ill-defined, southern darkness. It’s a standard fantasy world full of drab brown woods, caves and deserts that tend to blend together. On a technical level though, it’s hard to deny just how dense and detailed the 3D environments and characters are.

After choosing a class like the close-range Barbarian or long-range witch, up to 8 players can join together to travel the landscape accepting quests, equipping loot and battling monsters with polished swords and colorful spells. Solo players may find combat repetitive and occasionally overly difficult. However, co-op multiplayer allows for larger strategies and easier crowd control. No matter how they choose to play though, warriors of Iesabel will be hard-pressed to find anything they haven’t seen in a million other dungeon crawlers. Instead, they’ll be saddled with stuttering controls, long load times, weird sound hiccups, general mild instability and a Barbarian that sounds like someone’s impression of someone else’s impression of a silly, gruff Batman voice.

Iesabel doesn’t have one big, insurmountable issue just a series of little, unfortunate ones. That means anyone interested in the core Diablo-style gameplay should probably be able to overlook most, if maybe not all, of the problems. That core part, the most important part, is a well-crafted experience with around 8 hours of content or more for those who choose to have multiple characters. More chapters are also on the way and hopefully they’ll bring more technical fixes along with them. As it is now though, Iesabel won’t convert anyone to the dungeon crawler cause, but it does a decent job of preaching to the choir.