Whoa, it's here!
Awesome work, Jazza! Glad to see this made it through before Christmas and to have been a part of this on the voice acting side! Wish I made my narrator just a shade deeper, but it's good for what it was. Hurray for random spiels by Melahn! :-)
The whole game is pretty short, but that only makes it more addictive: being able to play a game the entire way through in one sitting means I can experiment with different playstyles for the Paladin. I also love the little details like the way the Paladin faces the direction your mouse is hovering in (meaning you can back away while chopping at the same time, a tactic that should be included in more sidescrolling beat-em-ups) as well as the way the view sort of opens up when you're flying to increase your sight range (as flying should do, seeing as you're high in the air and all). Being able to see the bosses Health and Aura levels was a nice touch as well. I love the fact that the bosses can't cheat by spamming spells - they have an Aura level that needs recharging (albeit far faster than the Paladin himself, of course).
The unlockable extras and cheats were a very nice touch - I liked being able to access the music and cutscenes seperately from playing the actual game through. And great work on the invisible and convenient auto-save system! It's verr' nice, indeed - especially since the game does, unfortunately, go INSANE and crash on occasion. It doesn't happen often, but sometimes during the loading (or saving?) screen, there would suddenly be a million of the"Settings" menu from the right mouse click that keeps popping up then closing then popping up again over and over. And then there's the weird "getting stuck in the horizontal plane" bug that seems to happen because of the low-gravity cheat. Not too sure about that, but that's when it happened to me.
Anyway, for those people having difficulty with the game, I found the most effective build to be maxing out your Strength (to swing harder)), followed by your Dexterity (to swing faster) which should take care of most of the enemies in one hit - the skeletons in the catacombs in two. Next, max out your Power Attack spell, you'll be using that as your main means of attack on the bosses. Now my theory on doing that is: while It's close-ranged, which means you're more likely to get hit a lot, you're not as likely to miss as you are with the other (prettier) spells. Put a couple of points into the Shockwave spell (or just one will do) - it's pretty handy at knocking down a whole bunch of enemies at once. After that, max Health and Aura evenly (or one over the other, if you find you're using a lot of Health/Aura Potions). And when you find you've got nothing else to do, you can go ahead and max out Speed. It's not really all that useful when most of the enemies are close-ranged, but it might help in the last couple of boss battles when you're chasing the boss around the arena.
As for boss strategies: Power Attack, Power Attack, Power Attack, Aura Potion, Power Attack. At least, for the ones who aren't teleporting around. For those that are: Aura Shield to take the edge off ranged attacks, then run up and do Power Attacks, as well as Shockwave to interrupt them in the middle of their teleportation spell. And if you meet a boss without Power Attack yet? Hit and run tactics will work - especially if you have 18 Strength. That hits pretty hard.
Whew, I think this review has gone on long enough. Anyway, great job on this game - and seeing as you've got a pretty efficient game engine coupled with means of telling a story, hopefully you can do more of these in the future! :-) Longer! More monsters! More bosses! More story! More amusing sidekick characters! More collectables Some sidequests to let you level up and get shiny items would be nice too! :-P
Super PSTW Action RPG 
PALADIN: the Game 
-ESCAPE- 
2006| LoP Trilogy 2 
