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Ring of Udrai - A fun game

Warning: This review contains spoilers. All story spoilers will be marked like so:
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this is a spoiler!

I don't care about spoiling individual abilities that characters get, or other simple things like that; I'd have to spoiler the entire review.

Ring of Udrai is a fun game about two mercenaries, Cedo and Angelica, who are shipwrecked while escorting Eddy, a sage.
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After teaming up with a girl from the village and a relic hunter, they make their way guided by Eddy to destroy a demon who was demanding sacrifices from the village of Easthaven.


Overall, the game is quite fun. It kept me amused for the entire time while playing it.

Graphics
The terrain in this game is for the most part average to above average. Nothing attracted my attention as ugly or exceptionally beautiful.

One interesting factor of RoU is that almost every object can be interacted with. Pots? Wall cracks? Piles of sand? Yep, all of them. Sometimes they contain items, sometimes money, and the majority of the time, nothing (though it still gives you a message).

At first, getting things out of these objects was somewhat common, so I clicked on every one of them. Later in the game, however, you only get a couple gold from the lucky ones and the rest of them are just nothings. In addition, I did not want to scroll through the text every time so I stopped doing these at all.

These interactions were a good idea but quite overdone. They were overwhelming which caused me to not want to do any at all.

About the world map: it is tiny. This is the entire world map:

However, there is quite a bit to do in those screens, so I was not put off by that.

Characters
Meet our two main characters, Cedo and Angelica.


Cedo fell unconscious when he was struck by a mast and forgot what his mission had been and how he arrived at the island. He's grumpy most of the time, and doesn't forgive as quickly as Angelica.

He uses axes
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and picks
as his weapon, and hits enemies extremely hard.
After receiving the
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Ring of Udrai item, there is little reason for you to ever use his regular attack or abilities; just use thunder rage

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Angelica is more silly and frivolous than Cedo. Personality wise, she is a stereotype of women, but I won't get into that here.

Angelica is our main healer, and she's awesome indeed. Healing from boss hits in 1 turn? Yep. Doing the same for the whole party? You bet. Curing status effects? Absolutely. Tragically, her effectiveness wanes as the game goes on, and it becomes more effective to use potions on the last bosses.
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(sorry, no pics for these, only for main 2 characters.)
Betty is a girl from the village who joins your party after
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you obtain the Ring of Udrai for her


In combat, she is our battle mage. Simple spells: fire, ice, group fire, group ice. Unfortunately she is hilariously ineffective against any monster that she doesn't have a type advantage against. Her magic is better than her attack but doesn't stand up at all to the other characters abilities.
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Zeebo is a relic hunter, thief, and assassin. He joins you in the
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abandoned mining village after some storyline in the first village.


In combat, he is only second to Cedo. He has a double attack that costs nothing, so spam this every turn. He does have a steal ability, but it costs 40 TP (see gameplay) and is extremely useless. I stole about 6 times, and I either got 3-4 gold or nothing (from bosses). Luckily his ultimate, Backstab, makes up for this all by doing a gigantic amount of damage.
Gameplay
Gameplay is fairly well implemented. Nothing revolutionary here, and nothing broken here. There is one system that could have been interesting but unfortunately fails for all characters but one: TP

I forget what TP stands for, but it's essentially combo points. The more you attack, the more you get TP. The two mages don't use TP, but SP, so the system doesn't apply to them. Cedo uses TP, but there is no reason to use it.
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The Ring provides you with a skill that enabled Berserk with huge damage, so you deal more than you do with any of your spells.

So, Zeebo is the only one who uses this system in reality. It does work quite nicely for him, though.

This game uses a random encounter system. The run chance is quite high, which I appreciate greatly, but so if the random encounter rate. The enemies are balanced well, except perhaps for the scorpion (boatloads of HP). The bosses are balanced fine.

The bosses are relatively undynamic, having no scripted events and the such. The ideas, however, for the bosses are quite neat.
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For example, 4 bosses who transform out of green stone when you try to destroy the stone


The game can be saved at any time, and you can go through text quickly, so the game gets points for that.

Overall, the game is well balanced but you won't find anything that "wows" you.

Story
Storyline is believable and fun. Even though a few things are not explained, most things are understandable, and the game creates its own lore. This is a quick summary of the story.
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Eddy appears in spirit form short after you land, and says that you are chosen to help fight the evil on the island. The evil, as you find out in the village, is a demon/necromancer team who demand sacrifices from the village. The abandoned mining village refused to give these sacrifices and was thus destroyed. The only chance is to acquire the Ring of Udrai, which will allow you to hurt the demon and the necromancer.

Betty, the soon-to-be-sacrificed woman from the village joins you as a mage, and a relic hunter joins you in return for giving him a rare dagger. Our team destroys the Elrock monsters in the mines and then takes the village's boat and goes to the demon's castle. After they destroy the demon, they enter to fight the necromancer, but he summons up an evil god to distract you and escapes. Our villagers are saved from the demon and celebrate with the heroes.


Pros/cons
- There are some books, "Life Hack" books, scattered around which give tips.
- Storyline well explained but not annoyingly in-depth.
- Well balanced game- you won't find anything that shocks you unless you are doing it wrong. (Well, with the exception of one optional boss ;)).
- Lots of interaction with the environment.
- NPCs all have something interesting to say.
- Items have somewhat unique names.

- Quite short; I finished in 2:34:43 with doing every sidequest I could find. I believe I could finish in around 2 hours if I tried again.
- Unimaginative skills; you won't find many original spells.
- Perhaps too much interaction with environment.
- Only one thinking puzzle, and it is extremely simple.
- Not much optional content; one boss and two quests are optional.

Conclusion
This is a fun game. Several aspects leave a bit to be desired, but it will keep you entertained for at least one playthrough. I don't believe I would play it again, but that's OK: it was good while it lasted!

Thanks for your work on this! It's obvious that quite a bit went into this game.