Bytten

"Explore endless dungeons and ruins, find thousands of mystical treasures, undertake dangerous quests, play 7 different mini-games and meet mysterious races, all with the goal of collecting as much gold as possible during your 10 Realm exploration." And all this in only 10 to 15 minutes apparently.

If you're wondering why the developers think you can get through all of the above in a mere 15 minutes, then I should probably explain that Voyager is referred to as an Adventure RPG with card-based combat. Why that phrase means you can play through the game so quickly isn't clear to me, but I've managed to play 2 games through in 15 minutes so gameplay is very speedy.

Explaining the concept of the game would take me a long time so I'll let you refer to Stormcloud's website for that, but to put it simply, you play an adventurer who's life is played out by way of you selecting various cards to decide his fate. The cards can be locations or actions and at various points you'll encounter enemies to fight against using top-trump-like power cards.

The central idea behind the game is that you can explore entire worlds, have fun adventures, collect treasure and fight to stay alive. The premise sounds great, but when you play the game you realise that adventuring in Voyager is akin to reading a short adventure novel by randomly selecting which page to read next.

I'm afraid that I just couldn't find any enjoyment in Voyager. Despite the fantastic presentation, beautiful visuals and more than pleasant sounds on offer, the 'gameplay' was completely un-interesting to me. After playing through a few adventures I soon realised that I was simply reading paragraph-long short stories with a random ending.

Perhaps this is simply a case of the reviewer not understanding the genre, in which case you should download the demo for yourselves. However, I'm going to stick to my guns and say that Voyager is simply an exercise in button clicking only. If you find more enjoyment than that, I salute you.

Keywords: voyager review, stormcloud creations reviews, stormcloud creations games, voyager scores, pc game reviews, indie game reviews, independent gaming.