Summoner

The Good
This should have been a fun game, with the innovative ideas for a magic system and story. While playing through the initial area I was pretty excited, it was oddly reminiscent of Dungeon Siege but much more interactive.

The Bad
Sadly, once you leave the initial encounter you find that you've been saddled with a bad port from the consoles.

The world map is so low-resolution and visually hashed that you can't read anything but the main city location and a vague idea that the terrain north of there is different from that in other directions. Worse, you will be given quests that depend on being able to read that map - "go to the hill northwest of town".

The quest journal is incomplete and spotty, so if you want to remember what you've been asked to do you need to keep pen and paper handy. There's no automap, so you are on your own trying to remember where a given shop or person was.

Too many of the quests involve trudging back and forth across zone loading boundaries, and (I'll mention it again) trying to remember where you found that shop that you've now been asked to visit.

Combat, even granting that this is an "action RPG" is too dependent on reflexes and button control - what you might expect on a console with a gamepad but out of place in a PC game; even if you have a gamepad for your PC it's too much like Mario and too little like Diablo.

The Bottom Line
It might have been a good console action RPG a la the more recent Zeldas, but the port is terrible and the game itself is too reflex-oriented and shallow to compete on Windows.