I
am a serious dark gamer. If it can be hacked, slashed, shot, bludgeoned,
or basically dismembered I love the game. The more monsters, the better
the potential carnage you may wreak. I am also a serious RGP player.
If it has a good story line and interesting characters, then I can
lose myself for days in the game.

Diggles
is neither. It is a story of a clan of so ugly-they-are-cute Diggles
who basically spend most their time digging, eating, sleeping, and
making little Diggles. You have a quest…to recover Odin’s pet
dog, Feris. In order to do that you have to free a prisoner from the
trolls to get the key to the underworld. Oh and retrieve six rings
to the leash for little adorable demon Feris. After playing the game
for a week I finally found the trolls. Sound frustrating? It isn’t.

The
main reason I took so long was due to the obsessive compulsion that
overcomes the gamer to play a minor god to these Diggles. They have
mood swings ranging from deliriously happy to totally torqued. Sometimes
you have to tell them to eat…other times you have to manually
change their hours of work so they have time to be alone with their
partner in order to snuggle…or you will not have little Diggles
to replace the older ones as they die. Assigning tasks, building required
buildings for advancement into the industrial age, digging to find
underground arenas of water, food, and other Dwarves…it gets
to be a worse addiction than gambling in a casino with no clocks!

The
graphics are fantastic. Your Diggle’s eyes blink, head’s shake, arms
fly, and body language shows whether they are happy and skipping,
tired and sloughing, mad and picketing. Yes I said picketing. If they
get mad enough they will refuse to do anything you tell them to. Often
times they will simply stop work until their moods improve.

The
sound is animate-related. These guys talk to each other, grunt as
they work, squeal when they fall over, and giggle…a lot. There
are cut scenes with interactive dialogue as well, where mouths move
in extreme close timing with sound.

Frankly, I never thought
I would have ever been caught dead playing what I considered to
be a “cutesy” game. Diggles is now one of my fave
raves. I have several friends I have ordered to buy it so we can discuss
“Diggle Strategy”. One of them told me I was nuts, until
I let her play ten minutes or so the BETA game I have here. Now she
is dyeing to get her hands on the actual game.

Game goes live in a computer
store nearest you late February. I highly recommend you go and get
a copy. Of course, make sure you have someone close by to keep track
of time….

System Requirements:

Minimum requirements: Pentium
350
64 MB RAM
8x CD-ROM drive
16 MB RAM SVGA video card
Direct X 8.0
Mouse
Windows compatible sound card
Windows 95/98