Ultima™ 8 Gold Edition

Very good

good

This game will always hold a place in my heart as one of the best, most innovative games of all time. I played it so much as a kid, and it still holds up.

Like many Ultima players I am an Ultima fanatic. I have played them all, and consider Ultima VII and VII Part 2 to be the best CRPGs ever. Needless to say I bought Ultima 8 the day it came out, and to this day I have never been as disappointed with a purchase. I understand that they wanted to do something different with Ultima 8. It's more action oriented. It's single player. It has a much darker story line. I think that the game fails on all of these levels. I just re-played the game last month, and time did not improve the experience. I find the story boring and un-Ultima. They were trying to put out a game where the Avatar must act in a very non-Avataresque way in order to escape a hostile alien world. What they produced was a story where you don't even try to make a difference. It would have been far more interesting to write a storyline where the Avatar overcomes a hostile alien world by sticking to his Virtues, but frankly I don't think the writers had the chops for it. In any case they didn't try. The game play is bad. You start the game very fragile, and even with magic armor and the best weapon in the game you can be easily killed in a very short period of time. On top of that there are a lot of instant-death jumping puzzles. The worst part for me was that navagating around the undergound maze that forms the world's main highway was a nightmare without a detailed map. This was the first game that I ever bought a hint book for out of necessity in those long lost days before you could look up solutions on the intrawebs. The only reason that I give the game 2 stars is that I like their experiments with the magic in the game. They created 4 new magic systems and you must master them all. Sorcerery is far too complicated, though, and the game engine makes preparing your spells the equivalent of a pixel hunt adventure game. Interesting idea, but hobbled by the game engine. I would rather play Ultima 2 again then play this game a third time.

Incredible bad controls, even for it's age.