Lots of wasted potential, but a fun ride nonetheless
Dink Smallwood is a free comical RPG. The fact that it's free shows that it's not a big or content-rich game. It can be finished in around 5 hours and the RPG elements are very shallow. But because of its satisfying combat and exploration, you can forget about its problems and enjoy what it has ( although little ) to offer.
The story is about a pig farmer called Dink Smallwood who loses his home and mother in fire and becomes an adventurer. His great deeds will lead him to a meeting with the king and then a mission to go to the darklands and beat the ancient evil that's threatening the land.
DS is a humorous game, but the implement of the humor is not very well done. Humor is uncalled for most of the time and it's silly rather than funny. But since the maker of the game knew the game would stink if it had a serious theme ( because of its cliche ridden story and settings ) maybe making it a comical game was not a bad idea.
DS is consisted of 6 regions and you must do certain things in every region to be allowed to enter in the next one. There are couple of areas in every region that can be full of enemy, loot or simply nothing. Dink has three stats: Attack, defense and magic and every time you gain a level, you can increase one of them by one point. Although the main source of increasing your stats are the potions and weapons you find. Another RPG aspect of the game is the equipment and weapons you can buy from vendors. They are few in numbers and you don't much choice. They are also pretty expensive and you have to grind gold coins ( and XP in the process ) by killing monsters and waiting for them to respawn by running around the map and killing them again. Although the good thing about this is that every time you buy a new weapon ( or get a new magic ) you feel significantly more powerful and it's not like some other RPGs that every new weapon does only 1% more damage.
One of the great features in the game is the ability of speeding things up by pushing down the tab button which saves up a lot of time when you just want to go from a point to another or waiting for your magic to cool down. I think this feature should be used in many other games.
Other parts of the game like visuals, sound effects and musical scores are pretty ordinary. Not weak, but nothing spectacular either.
Dink Smallwood's structure of game-play is brilliant, but it doesn't use its full potential. If developers would use it in a bigger more detailed RPG with some
improvements, it would definitely end up in good results. But right now, if you are in mood for a lite- RPG which doesn't cost you money, Dink Smallwood is probably the best choice.