outlet

It's a great concept, and a really beautiful game... someone really spent a lot of time designing and modelling here. It's such a pity that the actual gameplay fails so miserably.

Poor pathfinding and sluggish controls (including your actual mouse cursor, even on a high-end system) plague the game. The interface is also less-than-intuitive, although with a few minutes spent with it you can figure it out quite well.

The control, in theory, is very well done. You can move the camera pretty much anywhere you want around the character, and it all works pretty well. Unfortunately, you still have to deal with the fact that the mouse cursor itself moves sluggishly and skips about, regardless of the graphical settings.

On top of this, the pathfinding is frankly terrible, as I said before. Combat is also quite excellent, in theory, but the execution fails miserably. The idea is that you can strike and dodge in real-time using the movement keys, and for the most part this works. Combat seems very, very painfully slow, though, and the difficulty of doing any targetting with the sluggish mouse makes it easy to be quickly killed because you couldn't click on an opponent that's circling you.

All in all, Mistmare would've been an amazing game if they'd just gotten the controls right. I *want* to play this game through, I really do, but I just can't sit through more than 30 seconds of the control problems. Now, if they release a patch fixing some things, I would absolutely love it.

10 out of 10 for potential, 1 out of 10 for execution. I just can't give the eye-candy points because I can't play the game long enough to see anything compelling.

**quick addition**

After reading the review below (Thanks for the idea), I did some checking up on systems. The high-end system thing is right, but you can go all the way down to an 800 MHz Pentium 3 and it still isn't happy. If things get fixed to a respectable degree, this review will change to a 5 out of 5, rather than the 1/5 it's got now. I just can't rate a game highly if I can't play it.

Mistmare is an incredible game. What I mean by that is the story is completely different from any kind of adventure RPG type game I have ever played. This game has the potential to be absolutely incredible except for one thing: It doesn't run worth a darn on High End systems! Can you believe that? Yes, it's true, all you have to do is go to the forums on their site to see the multitudes of complaints about the freeze ups and slow downs on high end systems (2.0 ghz and above mostly) Oh, they have a patch for it, but it doesn't address any of these issues at all. It is a VERY frustrating game to play because of this. The developers of Mistmare have said they are working on the problem, but I am not real sure they are serious about fixing it. Maybe if a few reviews are posted on the internet something will get done. I am going to start an email campaign to complain about this. Anyway, if you have an old system that doesn't provide extreme power, you should be able to play this incredible game... if you have a new high end power system... BEWARE!!