The backstory for Harbinger is almost as simple as the game itself. There's a giant spaceship, The Harbinger, which cruises through solar systems devouring every planet and civilization in its path. Along the way, it sucks up a few life forms to use as slaves and crew. After a few hundred years of this, several alien races have managed to take up residence in the bowels of the ship, forming an underground society. The members of this society live the lives of scavengers and mercenaries, taking odd jobs assigned by other races or the ships' crew to earn enough to live another day.

When the game starts, you choose your character from one of the three races: Human, Gladiator or Culibine. The Humans are standard RPG fare, with a general mix of skills and the ability to adapt to new situations more quickly than the other races. The Gladiators are the cybernetic heavy hitters of the game; basically they are humanoid battle tanks. Gladiators can also control other mechanical items, from cameras to small robots. Lastly, there's the Culibine, who is the last of her race, and is able to bend the energy of the environment to her will. After you've chosen your character, it's time for the game to begin.

Through a series of interactions with other characters, you'll be assigned various tasks. These tasks start out simple, with you just retrieving some spare parts from areas of the ship, to the more complex, such as rescuing a buddy from interrogation by one of the enemy life forms. To complete the tasks, you'll use teleporters, called umbilicals, to get from place to place aboard the ship. You'll need all your wits about you, as your character will fight off hoards of alien races on his/her way to complete the mission objectives.

Harbinger uses the combat system pioneered by other RPG's such as Diablo. You just point your mouse on your chosen target and click. A left click launches the melee attack (assuming you're within range) and a right click delivers a ranged weapon attack. Your characters always start out with a basic armament, so you can jump right into the fray. After you kill an opponent, you'll earn experience points that will help you increase your skill levels. You'll need to increase your skills since the enemies get smarter and the weapons get trickier to use as the game progresses.

The corpses of your fallen foes can, of course, be looted for upgrades and money. Money is important if you want to buy better equipment, and the upgrades are useful in leveling up your weapons and defenses. An interesting component of the upgrade system is the level requirements, that is, to use some items you must have enough skill points in specific areas. For example, to use a Spider Mine, you need to have a high enough "rigging" skill. If you don't have the skills needed, that item is just dead weight, so it pays to be careful when you spend your skill points.

The real low point of the gameplay is that the lack of character classes. Having only three classes, which are actually races, to choose from really limits the RPG feel of the game. While I enjoy the simplicity of the gameplay, the lack of character diversity really hinders your amount of interest in your character since you can't create a character that even vaguely reflects your preferences in an RPG character.

Graphics

The graphics in Harbinger aren't the most amazing thing you'll see on a PC any time soon. While they have a nice 3D look to them, the character sprites lack enough detail to give them any lasting aesthetic appeal. The environments, while frequently very detailed, lack textures, which gives everything from walls to water a flat and unrealistic appearance.

Animation can sometimes be a little choppy, while the weapon effects are bland and uninspired. Combat animation often becomes nothing more than clusters of enemies smothering your character with little arms swinging in all directions.

Sound

Much like the graphics, the sound is pretty middle-of-the-road. While the music during the loading screens is actually a catchy little tune, there's not much in-game music to speak of. Game sounds are your standard clanking of weapons, whooshes of weapon blasts, and half-hearted death rattles coming from falling foes. The sound is lacking anything compelling, you could play this entire game with the audio turned off and really not miss anything. Even the voice acting is flat, which is too bad, since the voice actors they used have great voices, they just were completely unchallenged by the voice directors (if there were any).

Replayability

Harbinger's replayability is limited by several factors, not the least of which being the linear nature of the story. It's a "follow this, do this" type of adventure, which leaves little room for exploration or deviation from the story. Also, the lack of character diversity hampers your immersion in the gameplay, so you're not apt to start the game over as another character once you've finished it.

While the replayability is limited, it should be noted that there are many, many hours of gameplay available in Harbinger. You won't be finishing this title in one sitting, so you should be able to get your money's worth with just one play-through of it.

Overall

So, the gameplay is simplistic, the sound is uninspired, and the graphics are just so-so…this game must be a dog, right? Wrong ! Believe it or not, even with its minimalist design, it's still a good bit of fun to play. It's a nice mix of Diablo and Fallout, which is works out to an enjoyable dungeon crawling RPG. The first time I picked up Harbinger, I actually played it for five hours straight, continually returning to the game to play "just one more mission." Sometimes, a simple design lends itself to a lot of fun, and that's exactly what Harbinger brings to the RPG genre; simplicity and fun. If you enjoy PC-based action RPG's, give Harbinger a shot, you'll really get a kick out of it. Just don't come into it expecting a full-on 3D sensory experience with insanely deep levels of gameplay.

See more screens in the Harbinger media page.