holoz0r's A-Z of Steam: Enclave - an action role playing game

This is a game that I hadn't heard of, and something that genuinely surprised me when I first loaded it up. This is a game that was originally released on the ... XBOX (The first XBOX!) - and then eventually made its way to the PC the following year.

It is an action role playing game where you choose to play either the "light" or "dark" campaign. There's a back story around the world being split into two lands, linked only by a rift that is slowly but surely closing. It's a fairly shallow story, with the game play taking the stage as the main draw card.

Game play is exploration of generic looking medieval areas, mixed in with combat. Combat is pretty easy - click to attack, press a few buttons to change weapons, and watch the things that are attacking you die.

The game runs just fine. There's some problems though, with its age - the physics and controls are a bit jarring and definitely not modern in their nature.

There's no controller support at all.

We're talking ancient history here as far as games are concerned, with the XBOX version released in 2002, and the PC version, 2003. This means the game is seventeen years old.

As a result, it runs surprisingly well, and with no workarounds or patches required. I initially was going to play this on my high refresh rate monitor (which is a 1080p, 144hz panel) - but it was running at over THREE THOUSAND frames per second, so I thought it appropriate to play it on my 4K 60hz monitor instead. Still, well over 2000 frames per second. Ridiculous.

This game is definitely worth a play, but it shows its age in its mechanics and underlying architecture. Having said this, a lot of other games have aged in a much less flattering way, especially those released at the same time as Enclave.

There was brilliance here, and upon its release, this would've been a stunning game.