DeathSpank is a lot of things; defender of the downtrodden, saviour to orphans, and taco deliveryman, among other things. The titular hero of Ron Gilbert's latest brainchild is as ludicrous as he is powerful, and you'll be slashing and shooting your way through hundreds of mobs in this Diablo-style quest. Like Blizzard's legendary series, DeathSpank gets its hooks into you fast with addictive levelling and looting elements; I found myself spiralling toward the highest character level and best gear with increasing ferocity as I played on. It also introduces all sorts of great adventure game fusions, befitting considering the game's creator. But it also falters a fair amount as well, and these drawbacks bring what should be a terrific game down to a merely good one, albeit one that genre fans should absolutely play.
Billed as a bizarre parody piece for action RPGs, DeathSpank's ludicrous plot involves an evil lord, demon dung, a world-spanning orphan rescue, and all sorts of other weirdness. The laughs start out a bit on the juvenile side, and initially I had a fairly indifferent reaction towards the game's comic undertone. But as the game picks up the pace and gives you more and more of the map to explore, the humour similarly expands and opens up to all kinds of great puns and experiments with language and irony. By the time I was helping Pippin Apple rescue his brother Red Delicious, I was pretty much on board with the game's particular style of humour.
The problem with some of the laughs in DeathSpank is that they can often poke fun at action RPG tropes while simultaneously committing them. Obviously that's the joke, but in a video game, where you must constantly be mindful of the mechanics, having to fetch an item and return to the quest giver for the eighth consecutive time wears a bit thin.
The game is at its best when it's doing something new for the genre it's roasting. You'll be running around killing enemies and collecting loot while earning experience points, using the controller's d-pad and face buttons as bindings for any weapon or food item you choose. However, you'll also need to exercise a few adventure game muscles to solve little word plays to suss out where you need to go during a quest, for example. Combining items from your inventory to affect your surrounding environment is also a welcome fusion with the action RPG style. In a genre where repetition is a necessary evil, it's nice to need at least a bit of brain power to progress through some quests. For fans of not thinking, fortune cookies can be consumed for quest hints that will give you a push in the right direction, usually without spoiling the actual solution.
It's all good fun, but the game's simplicity yields more disparate threads that conspire to weaken DeathSpank's otherwise impressive yarn. Although the combat feels very good, anyone but the most novice of hack and slash players will wish for something more substantial. Some consumable items allow you to have some fun with area of effect attacks, but there's no real spells or skill trees of any kind to progress through. This was clearly a choice made to make the game more accessible, but action RPGs thrive on the ability to explore different approaches to the gameplay. The inclusion of some meatier RPG elements would have gone a long way to discourage tedium and add to the value.
As it stands, though, DeathSpank is a very good game that will certainly please action RPG fans in spite of some issues. It's not a long game, and there isn't much incentive to play through it again; you'll more or less have seen it all by the credits. But for fifteen bucks, that shouldn't stop you from experiencing this manic, addictive, and pretty funny game the talented folks at Hothead have made. With a little more depth and emphasis on its uniqueness, DeathSpank may have been one of my favourite game worlds in ages. As it stands, I just really like it.