A quick reconfiguring of my Skill Deck and a short sprint later, I was destroying bears with a renewed fervor. It didn't look like I was alone; before I died it seemed that the bear population was somewhat scarce, as it took me almost ten minutes to kill five of them. After my respawn, I couldn't walk more than three feet without tripping over some bloody and still warm bear carcass. How wasteful! I suppose the low population of bears is reasonable; they don't exactly roam around in packs, especially when they know I'm on the prowl and have a quota to meet. For a largely non-loot driven game, I did seem to find lots of loot boxes popping up after downing a bear asking me if I wanted to take a “bear vertebrae” off the corpse. This lead me to believe that not only had I just killed this thing, I had LIQUIFIED it with my knife. A few pocket fulls of paws, spines, and other assorted bear parts later, I was stinking up the forest so damn bad that I was suddenly ambushed by a pack of boars that gored me but good. They would not have my bear parts, however. I cackled after looking back into my loot back after respawning, again, finding that the boars were the ones to come up short hoofed.

I decided ten bears were enough for the day, no need to cull the population too much and rob others of the satisfaction one can only get by slaughtering bears, and had a short talk with the man who gave me the task of killing these interlopers in the first place. He smiled, handed me some potions that would increase my maximum hit points for a while (would have come in useful while actually fighting the bears), and slipped some nasty looking coins into my pocket. Irked, I quickly looked around to see if anyone was looking and silently slit his throat and relived him of some money he was no doubt giving to other up and coming bear slayers, and quickly logged out.

Overall, The Chronicles of Spellborn Gold is a decent looking game. It has some newfangled mechanics and controls which will appeal to some, but will probably drive off most. The targeting system, while interesting, didn't really do anything to make the game more exciting. I would say it would make PVP a bit more interesting, but I'm left to believe that most duals would quickly degenerate to your common knife duel, as seen in Counter-Strike:Source. The game is also psuedo-free: you're allowed to download the game at no charge and mess around in the world as you see fit until level seven. After you hit this lucky number, you won't gain anymore experience, and you'll have to pay for a subscription using Acclaims badly implemented “Coins Subscription”. Basically, you get a monthly subscription like any other pay to play, only every month you'll have to buy more coins instead of just the game automatically billing you. Bear slaying aside, a bear hunter has a lot of worries from day to day, and whether or not I have enough of these Acclaim Coins to keep playing should not be one of them. But hey, go ahead and give it whirl. You might like it...and you get to kill bears!