DeathSpank

The gauge charges quickly enough for this to be only a minor annoyance, but it would have been nice to see an extra button combo requirement to use its powers. The attacks themselves are useful, and picking up rare runes allows the player to combine two in-hand weapons in a single devastating justice attack - a spinning-fire-slash of flamey-doom, for example.

Blocking is another seemingly underused mechanic, made difficult by the lack of obvious animation tells in many enemies' attacks. Using several different weapons one after the other will also build a combo counter, maxing out at seven with a powerful knockback attack, but it's a difficult thing to pull off, and not rewarding enough when you do.

There's a distinct lack of penalty to death, the cash dropped on extinction easily gathered up once you respawn at one of the nearby 'outhouses', or by dropping extraneous kit into the handy 'item grinder' which turns anything into gold - neatly sidestepping the need to schlep back and forth between shops when your inventory fills up.

While it's possible to carefully plan an attack, using blocking and inventory items to nuance your approach in response to your foes, the constant nature of the hacking and the effectiveness of straight-up attack spamming means any impetus to do so quickly fades.

There are also very few puzzles in the game. It's not really Diablo crossed with anything, really, just Diablo lite. Even the website says, "Mind numbing yet completely fair adventure game puzzles!" but in truth these amount to the odd combination of inventory items or the picking of the right conversation tree.

There are a couple of moments that force the player to use their brain, but they fall so few and far between that your thinking muscles are likely to have atrophied. Should they do so, a handy hint system is in place, fuelled by the fortune cookies found lying around the landscape.

Like nearly any game in the genre, repetition is the key gripe. DeathSpank is clearly designed to be a fairly lightweight approach to hackandslash, fit for short bursts rather than long sessions, but a lack of depth to levelling, armour or weapon customisation makes a grind out of much of the action. Playful environments and enemies can only do so much to distract from the single mechanic on offer.

Quest types are split broadly into the two classic categories of kill and fetch, often artificially extended by forcing you to traipse back to the quest-giver in between the quick jaunts to pick up items from the local area rather than giving you a long list and letting you get on with it. There are plenty of side quests to tackle at your own pace outside of the lengthy storyline, but killing 'X number of Y to gather their Zs' is still just as familiar when you're chasing chicken-lizards as orcs. To rub salt into the wound, the items and equipment rewards for quest completion are often obsolete by the time you get them anyway, surpassed by pieces found in the field.

Local co-op should be a welcome addition, but when a second player jumps in as Sparkles the Wizard the structure breaks down considerably. Sparkles is limited to four unswappable spells, including a healing effort, but you're not challenged enough to warrant his assistance. Instead, as Sparkles spams his continuous fire attack in a turning circle, pretty much any threat is destroyed before it gets close enough to damage anyone.

It's not all doom and gloom. The inherent compulsiveness of these games means that it's easy to lose a couple of hours to DeathSpank at a time, the lack of concentration demanded by the gameplay working in its favour. Pacing is also good, with at least one appropriately levelled area to explore at any time, and usually more than one option - a feat made easier with the addition of a fast travel system.

It really is very pretty, too - a unique combination of patchwork prettiness and Grimm gross. And it's a big game, both in terms of its area and completion time, although there's little prospect of a replay once you reach the sequel and/or DLC-baiting conclusion.