In some rights, it isn’t fair to compare one game to another just because it plays very similar. It is very hard to make your product stand out in today’s world with something new and innovative. Still, I couldn’t help but feel as if I was actually playing Diablo II when I was, in fact, playing Sierra’s newest action RPG, Throne of Darkness.

To their credit, Click Entertainment has thought up a very intriguing back story to the game. With a tale of corruption by power and other cliché circumstances, it all goes out the window when we see the game takes place in an ancient Samurai world. It seems the big boy on the block has been inhabited by a demon in his castle upon a great hill. The four lower castles at the base of the hill have been attacked by their former leader, and they must now set out to rid the world of evil. See, cliché, but not so run of the mill when you read the huge instruction manual that gives so much more to it.

As I stated earlier, Throne takes place in a Samurai world. You have the choice of controlling seven different characters, but only four at one time. The characters break down into two different categories, melee characters and the range characters. For melee you have the Leader, Swordsman, Berserker, and Brick each with close range and powerful attacks with weapons. Long-range characters include the Ninja, Archer and Wizard. The part that really gets to me is the fact that experience distribution seems to very unmatched. When you have melee characters in your party, the computer will control the three you aren’t using. They will rush the enemy and just plain knock him on his ass (or cut it off -- more on that later). The long-range characters would be lucky to get one shot in before the enemy is taken down. In short, the melee characters will level up a lot faster than the ranged characters.

The character system does have one new feature I like. When a member of your party dies, he is sent to your daimyo, who will aid him to recover with a little of your mana to help him. You can them summon one of your characters waiting in the halls to come and join the party.

Combat feels too much like Diablo II. Don’t get me wrong: I love Diablo II. I have the $70 collector’s edition sitting above me right now safely in its box. But this is the kind of gameplay I expect from Blizzard, and I don’t really want to see everyone under the sun ripping off the same techniques. Still, Diablo veterans will feel right at home when playing Throne. Everything feels very similar. The skill level distribution screen, the spell leveling screen and even the inventory screen are very similar.

Which leads me into one of the game’s major problems, the inventory. The system works for one player just fine. Add three more and you have a bit of a problem on your hands. In Throne of Darkness, you will primarily be controlling one character at a time. If you are like me you will get accustomed to one character and try to use him as much as possible. So when you play a click-fest such as this one you are clicking all over and picking up all kinds of items, and one character will end up being overburdened because he is carrying everything. You then have to stop playing the game and micro-manage the inventory of one character out to the others, while getting things properly matched up for the right classes and such. The feature brinks on the border of tedium very quickly, and soon you will just forget about the inventory and just make what ever character you are controlling at that moment get all the good stuff, while you ditch the rest in favor of splitting some heads.

And boy oh boy do the heads split. Click’s "Decapitation Engine" (as I like to call it) is the biggest dismemberment theatre since Soldier of Fortune. Some enemies’ arms will fly off, leaving gapping holes with thick streams of blood gushing out during a shrill scream of death. At the beginning of the first level, when your castle has been overrun, there are bits and pieces of your predecessors lying all over the place in pools of their own blood. The game is not for the faint of heart, but since the characters are only two inches big on your computer screen, it may not be all that bad. Still, the game does carry and M rating and rightfully so.

Throne’s interesting graphics do add some light to an average game. The cell-shaded anime look does give the game a unique look, and while the introduction movie is very well put together, the several faults of the main game detract from the overall playability. The two biggest violations are the fact that you don’t sense you are doing very much of anything. You kill guysm pick up the same items over and over, and kill some more bad guys. Very redundant, and nothing really to change up what you are doing. The other major offense is the fact that it feels like Diablo II too much for its own good. Nearly a year and a half since the release of the Blizzard game, it puts a sour taste in your mouth to know that Click and Sierra tried to use the better points of Diablo, but just managed to rip them off instead.

Throne does have some high points, but anyone who has played Diablo II has already seen them done better, and in a way that makes the game actually fun. If sequel talks are on the table, I welcome it, I just hope they realize that games want to see something new, not 18 month old gameplay with prettier graphics.