Summoner

Discount Price: $9.99

Accessories:
PC Gamer (1-year)	Games for Windows: The Official Magazine

Customer Reviews:

Great game, one to keep [Posted on 2003-08-06]
The term 'RPG' is so loaded these days that it's hard to adequately judge whether or not you'll like a game from that 'genre' or whether it'll make you dump it in the trash out of disgust. Summoner is an RPG, in the sense that you play a number of characters that improve over time, gaining skills, equipment, and various powers on their way towards dishing out some plot-ending comeuppance. Here are a few things that particularly stand out to me about Summoner:

1) Graphics. Summoner is a beautiful game to look at. It's aging now, but still has excellent detail and is very immersive..little in the graphics will grate to such a degree you'll find yourself wondering what the heck happened.
2) Game play. Combat is real-time rather than turn based, with your characters operating dependant on the AI settings you give them..they can emphasize melee combat, ranged, healing, offensive spells, as well as perform specific acts you command them to do. Use the space bar to pause the action and dish out orders, then jump seamlessly back into the fray.
3) Questing. The game has a main quest and hundreds of small side quests you can perform or ignore. Some become fairly tedious and are multi-stage, so that if you're not careful you can miss a vital item or person and never be able to finish it. While you generally can explore however and for however long you wish, certain game events that occur will make you unable to go back and finish quests, as key NPCs or even areas have been destroyed or otherwise affected.
4) Exploring. I'm one of those players that loves to poke around in the wilderness and do my own thing for a while. In any RPG I look forward to the first chance I have to be independent and explore rather than trudge from point A, do task A, walk to point B, do task B, and so on. Summoner is great for this. You can roam around and encounter all sorts of strange things. The random encounters can often be challenging, but are always very detailed. You can escape them if necessary by running to a border in the encounter map a la Fallout/Fallout 2, which is a good way to survive if you get in over your head. I did that a lot. Another great aspect is that tasks are not cued to your levels. That is, exploring and leveling up will actually aid you later in the game, rather than just making everything harder. I always despised RPGs that had random encounters and other events react to your power level, so that you ran into red dragons outside pristine little villages in the middle of the kingdom. In Summoner, exploring is ALWAYS in your interest. Monsters drop random treasure, and extra levels will always help later on. I stumbled over a way to find rings of fire protection early in the game, and used them to finance a number of my item purchases.
5) Character Development. You don't really get many options in choosing your party/cast members, but they're varied enough not to be a real problem. Make sure to train them all up so they can survive on their own, since you'll likely have to play them individually (as well as your main Summoner guy) in the course of the game.
6) Replayability: Very high. The game world is very large, the towns and cities are vast, and the NPCs are very interesting. There always seems to be another area or monster or item or quest to check out, and not in the sort of desperately addictive way it can be in Diablo II. I never felt a sense that I was wasting time or losing out on "necessary" items if I went off the beaten path; both the game and the combat system reward creativity. One game you might favor archers, another you might favor swordsmen and melee tactics. It's really up to you.

All in all, Summoner is a great game with high visual standards that has really held up over the last couple years. You can play it for 30 minutes, or burn a weekend without thinking about it. In either event, you won't be disappointed.

Only game I've ever played more than once [Posted on 2003-11-21]
I loved Summoner! So much so that it's the only game I've ever played again - and again. I won't go over the story and the graphics and the gameplay - it's all been done.
What I found most enjoyable about Summmoner was the deversity of the main characters and that you get to play each of them at one one time or another. My favourite character was Flece, her theif, stealth and backstab skills made her an extraoridinary and likeable character to play.
The main map exploration and random encounters were a wonderful change from the usual. You could end up battling undead, fire salamnders, samurai, woodsmen, almost anything, and they all added to your XP and made you stonger for the Boss Battles, not to mention dropping great treasure.
The settings were all different, you can find your characters in sewers, in a monastry, a palace, church, town, underground city, tree-lined streets, swamp and even on a ship.
The combat 'chaining' system is a real challenge and you can't help but become intimately involved in this turn-based combat. Timeing is of the essence and your reflexes better be good, the more you chain, the more damage you do and the less chance your opponent has of getting a chance to have a go at you.
Summoner is my all-time-favourite game and I know I'll be playing it again soon.

Has its flaws, but still a pretty good RPG overall. [Posted on 2004-08-04]
The controls could use some work, the graphics are obviously outdated, and the voice work is terrible. But aside from these flaws I enjoyed Summoner. It's a good game - not bad, not great. I would give it 4 stars but...

In a town near the end of the game I came to a bug that has preventd me from finishing the game. In a place that you normally walk through to go to the next area, nothing happens when I walk there. It doesn't trigger the transition to the next area... so I'm stuck. I tried several things but nothing worked so I eventually just quit playing.

However, I realize that this bug is most likely a rare thing and so I wouldn't worry about it if I were you. But I still felt it was worth mentioing... and so I give it 3 stars.

XP Home/SP2 Review [Posted on 2006-09-21]
The game screen freezes 5-10 times per hour.
No pattern to these lockups: during a fight; just walking; picking up an item; cutscene etc...
ALT+CTRL+DEL won't always close the program ... I have to manually crash/power down the computer
I have installted patch v1.40; no help.
My SYS SPECS(... one year old computer) are much higher than the requirements.
THQ doesn't respond to e-mails for this game ... I did send one about a new game and received a reply = guess older games aren't high on their $upport(... no money in it for them)
There is no game knowledge base at THQ for Summoner ?

The game looks intereting and the reviews are positive.
So, those with earlier OS(...WIN 2000 not supported = mentioned upon installation) would do well to give this game a try.

I'm surprised a game from 2001 won't run on XP Home/SP2.
Just played one from 1996 and had no problems.

A Sadly Overlooked Game [Posted on 2007-01-02]
This game is, simply put, an incredible work for its time. Graphics are unimportant to me, but they're good in this game for the time it was made. More importantly it's an RPG that mixes some elements of action, witout losing any length or depth. Think Knights of the Old Republic only with traditional RPG depth and open endedness and more action packed battles (sorry, no light sabers though). Summoner still has an immersive world filled with interesting characters which can grow and lose hands and things. If you enjoy the character building and intelligence of RPGs but you get tired of slow-paced turn-based fighting, this game is for you.

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