Beautiful carnage

The game world varies greatly as you follow the main storyline, and you will end up chopping up a wide variety of monsters both outdoors and indoors. All the hacking and slashing is rendered in great detail - everything casts proper shadows and reflective surfaces look very nice indeed. The cost of all this is a very limited draw distance, but this is well hidden with the "creative" limitations of the steerable camera - more on that later.

Character animation and shading is exceptionally well done; their graphics have a kind of cartoony quality to them. They are not exactly cel-shaded, but there is a black outline drawn around the character models. This visual trick helps them to stand out from the complex backgrounds very well and it definitely works well in this game.

Visually Silverfall survives downgrading the eye candy pretty well - even at the lowest settings the characters are still recognizable.

Silverfall scales very well from "High" detail mode...

... to "Medium", which is quite playable even on a bit weaker system.

"Low" eliminates all shadows and most of the lighting effects, and the texture resolution goes way down, but even with these settings the game looks acceptable due to nice models.

Very nice shader effects at "High" settings.

Sack the cameraman

The biggest gripe I have with the visual side of Silverfall is the decision to give you a movable camera, but limit it so much that it's utterly pointless. You can't tilt the camera - it tilts automatically towards the horizon as you zoom closer, uncovering the short draw distance and making the viewpoint pretty much useless for anything except taking close-up screenshots. Your ability to zoom out is also limited by the short draw distance and at times you can end up running into hostiles that become visible only at the last moment. Granted, the game is perfectly playable by pulling the camera as far back as you can, and pretending it's a fixed camera, so the problem is not a deal-breaker by any means. It's just that a more flexible camera would have definitely helped here.

Changing the game settings is a whole another story though. The only way to change the graphical settings is to fully exit the game and start a separate settings utility. And it gets worse - even the separate utility has no way to reconfigure the controls! This is the year 2007, and we're effectively being told "Well... you can configure the keys by editing the ini file using the notepad" - pretty unbelievable, but true.