Forgotten Realms: The Archives - Collection Three

While this "collection" is just two titles, one of them, Dungeon Hack happens to be one of my favorite D&D games of that era. You roll a character up, tell the game how difficult you want it to be, even detailing how large an adventure you want to have and how dangerous you want it be with the difficulty and seed generator, then off into the depths you go! Its what the kids today call a "rogue-like", where you get a completely new, randomly generated adventure, each play-through. You fight monsters, find loot, solve puzzles and delve deeper and deeper. Its pure heaven for any D&D fan from the early 1990s.

It seems like most folks are buying this bundle for Menzoberranzan, which is fine - but don't overlook Dungeon Hack. Menzo is a lot of fun. It's more linear than the Ravenloft games that came before or after with it but also plays with the formula a bit more than those two games in other ways (there are characters in Menzo who will turn on the party or abandon it, etc.) I wish a couple more games had been done in this style, but the first person D&D games went out of vogue when Baldur's Gate came out and it's easy to forget there's only two and a half years or so between Stone Prophet (1995) and Baldur's Gate (1998). Dungeon Hack is a reminder that where D&D 5e hits you with a pillow, 2nd Edition came at you with a nailbat. This game shows no mercy, not even on the easy difficulty levels, and is a fun way to just proceed through a maze and click buttons... until you run into a level full of monsters that'll mop the floor with you. Anyway, I love both of these games. Either one of them would be worth this price alone.

I liked Dungeon Hack a lot when it came out. It's based on the Eye of the Beholder III engine and it's a good game for some inbetween hack & slaying. Think of it as a Diablo with Eye of the Beholder looks, with one great distinction: you get to customize your dungeon. Don't want any puzzles or key searching, just monster slaying? Turn those off and up the monster amount. Don't like undead? Turn em off. Underwater levels? Optional. It's all there. Sure it's simplistic and I still prefer Diablo (1), but this is still a guilty pleasure! Dungeon Hack is a solid 4 out of 5 Menzoberranzan however is a rather dull experience. The graphics are atrocious as it uses the Ravenloft 1 engine and thus looks very pixelated and actually worse than the older "step by step" Eye of the Beholder games. Sure it's got Dark Elves, but looking at those graphics will hurt your eyes, and unlike Ravenloft 1 this one's got no atmosphere. Menzoberranzan is a 2 out of 5

I wanna thank GOG for providing us such a wonderful electronic gems... but let's face it: the add-ons attached are few and petty. Why didn't they scratch a bit more and tried to gather more materials? After all we're paying for abandonware stuff that we can find easily elsewhere. On the other hand, I do love classic eighties and nineties RPG's, and concretely Dungeon Hack (http://dungeonhackgame.blogspot.com.es/), so I harbour no intention to avert the hypothetical new customers/gamers.

Supposed to be turn based at least for combat but it is not. So I regret buying it.