Ultima™ Underworld 1+2

This review is for Ultima Underworld 1, but any review I did for UW2 would have just as much praise. Quite simply, this is close to the best CRPG/dungeon crawler of all time. This game was revolutionary for its time and I spent many a long night playing this in the early 90s. It's old and it creaks, but its gameplay, story and immersion are rarely rivalled, even 30 years on. Not all is perfect though. Jumping is still a drama, and you get caught on walls and ledges a lot, but there are mods out there that make these things easier. But why is the GOG version of this game bundled in a Windows wrapper? To play it on Linux requires you to unrar the .gog file and run the installer that way - why was this even bundled as an .iso to begin with? It's not difficult to deal with, but it's annoying you have to at all.

The game play is good, graphics have been preserved, lots of great nostalgia; however, the audio/music port is awful, I hope there's an update to fix the sound.

Released in 1992, before even Wolfenstein 3D, this was one of the first games using a 3D environment, a real landmark in gaming and certainly RPGs. Plays very nicely on Steam Deck via Heroic launcher after some button remapping. Game controls are fairly horrible, inventory management painful, graphics &sound very dated (monsters and npcs are sprites!). Gameplay... classic 90s style maze like maps, find items, traps, fight monsters, lots of repetition & backtracking through levels. You definitely need to use walkthroughs as the levels are huge and often important items/locations/info virtually impossible to locate. And it goes on way, way too long. However it is still a good game with lots of charm, and you can tell the devs had a blast making it.

The firs thing that should strike you about these games is how well they have aged. The interface is friendly (there is no better automap out there), the graphics are colorful and charming, and the soundtracks are very evocative. The game are addictive like all great games are- you want to keep playing just to explore that one last piece missing on your map, but doing so leads to another area and before you know it hours have passed. Don't let the age of these games fool you!

If anything ever comes out that manages to match the UUW games for immersiveness, depth, and atmosphere, it will never leave my drive. Come to think of it, with very few gaps I've had Ultima Underworld in one form or another on my computer for literally the last 20 years -- that should tell you something.