Developed by Delphine Software International and published by Gathering of Developers, Darkstone is the newest action-oriented role-playing game to hit the streets. There is no doubt in our minds that Darkstone is in large part based off of Diablo's style. The question is, does it do the genre justice? Read on and find out.

The plot of Darkstone is simple. Draak, the Chosen One of Death, Dragon Lord, necromancer, and man about town, is doing some really not nice things to the land of Uma (not the actress). Your job, being the good guy, is to find the seven crystals that make up the legendary Time Orb, then use the Time Orb to beat the living snot (dead snot actually) out of Draak. OK, so it's not Great Expectations, but Darkstone is not about plot. Darkstone is about crawling through dungeons launching magic missiles at hideous creatures, stealing their treasure, and building your characters into incredibly powerful heros. Darkstone is hack and slash adventuring for fun and profit to the tenth degree.

And Darkstone does it well. The hack and slash of Darkstone is a lot of fun. You get to use one or two characters to slice through the evil minions of Draak like a Ginsu knife through a flying tomato. Your enemies, while not smart, are not wholly stupid. Creatures with missile weapons will attack from afar while brute force monsters will rush forward. If they can, they will try and attack you en masse. If a monster is near death, it will try to run out of range of your blows. You have to plan your attacks and be careful. The best tactic we found is to use a warrior type to block enemies while a magic user or archer fires missiles from afar. One really great thing about Darkstone is that no two games are alike. If you restart, the levels will be designed differently, and there will be different randomly chosen missions for you to complete. This does wonders for replayability. The game play of Darkstone is quite fun.