My college roommate loved the sci-fi author Spider Robinson because, as my roommate said, Spider ask you just to trust him one or two details. If you gave him those details, the rest of the story made sense. In Heretic Kingdoms, that detail you've just gotta believe is that ages ago, a mortal hero killed his world's God with a sword. I know, I know; not a very good God, was he? Just go with it. See, the sword then inherited the God's power, as did the hero. The hero went on to procreate, and the sword was hidden away.

Ages later, one of the hero's descendants convinced a besieged kingdom to allow him access to the sword to turn back an invading enemy. The kingdom said yes, and the descendant, not a very nice man, used the sword's power to take control. Thus began a period of misguided theocracy. Eventually, the populace has had enough, and a secret society engineers the killing of the Theocrat and the re-hiding of the sword. Religion was outlawed, prompting the formation of the Inquisition, in this world dedicated to stamping out all religion rather than enforcing it.

Until now, when the sword has been stolen, presumably by a group set on resurrecting the dead God. Two points if you guessed the hero's descendants are still lurking around, and that they've still got some special powers, and that our heroine is one of the rare females of the line.

Oh, and we'll up the ante by revealing that our heroine is a member of the Inquisition. In other words, she's a God-child working to rid the world of her ancestor's influence while using it at every turn. Like I said, a really good setup that actually gets play during the plot.

I'm going to skim a bit of gameplay, because by now you're familiar with the Diablo-style system of left-clicking to move and right-clicking to attack. What's really nice about Heretic Kingdoms is the "attunement" system. Almost every object in the game is attuned, which means it unlocks a special power for our heroine to use. Of course, there are requirements, whether it means attuning the object to one of the four elements (air, earth, fire and water) or using a weapon with a certain element or even having certain other equipment in place. As that object or those requirements are used in battle, the attunement progresses until finally being unlocked. There are so many of these, I seriously doubt you'll find all of them during one playthrough.

Also neat is the concept of the Dreamworld, a sort of spiritual plane open to God-children. The sword's theft has opened rifts in the Dreamworld, which means in every location you can switch planes and fight spirit-monsters for Essence, which boosts attunements far more than normal use.

Graphics are nice and crisp, with plenty of different locations. Even better, weapons look sufficiently unique that you can tell what's what if it's spread out on the ground. And trust me, you'll be in some big battles that leave lots of loot lying around. It helps to be able to tell whether you've seen a weapon before and which ones could be worth more to local merchants.

Sound is good, with decent ambient noise and, even better, good voice-acting. If only all international productions went to as much effort to hire decent actors!

So why no perfect score for Heretic Kingdoms? A few reasons. First, Heretic Kingdoms falls into the RPG trap of making magic far more powerful than melee. Sure, you're not locked into either, but I found myself rarely using hand-to-hand weapons when I could shoot out, for example, a 360-degree spread of lightning bolts. You'd have to go into the game intending to use melee almost exclusively, and so leveling up that skill, to get any worth from it.

Second, the Dreamworld is neat but sparsely populated. Aside from a very few areas, it serves only as a source of bad guys to kill for Essence. I guess I was expecting to find more non-player characters there.

My last problem is a nitpick: At the beginning of the game, you're asked to choose two attunements and, once the game starts, an element. I was under the impression the attunements would be permanent, and that the element choice would provide a bonus when using that element in the future. Attunements, you see, must be chosen each time you rest, and there are far more attunements than available slots. Hence permanent attunements would make sense; even more so if they were unable to be accessed after character creation, whereas the attunements available can be learned very early on no matter what. Instead, the choices don't at all impact gameplay later.

I don't want to end on a downer note like that. Heretic Kingdoms is done well and is a jewel in the crown of Europe's RPG Renaissance. Neither the real-time action nor the role-playing goodness is given short shrift, which is a hard balance to achieve. Heretic Kingdoms gets the balance right, and should be experienced by fans of both genres.