Betrayal at Krondor Pack

I cannot, in all good honesty, reccomend this game. Its based on a popular series of novels which I read years ago and still own. The story sounds interesting, largely because the author Raymond Fiest, wrote it. The gameplay descends into drudgery, largely through its core game mechanics. The endless tedium of the combats, that despite its open world nature, cannot be avoided. They are made all the more annoying by the party constantly missing, despite having higher than average chances to hit. This high rate miss ratio is matched only by the combats unfairness at times. The game does not level scale and the designers clearly thought mobbing your small party and wiping you out a lot is fun. So getting through this opening chapter is an exercise in patience. Its really not until the third chapter of the game that your party becomes less of a victim to these combats. Roleplaying games are not just about combat and story. There should be missions and small sidequests and opportunities for loot. Missions/Quests do exist, but the game has no in game journal keeping track of what you have taken on. This means that unless you keep notes, you will find it hard to track missions and quests. The loot is a typical mix of badly damaged armour and swords. A few coins but no real powerful loot or healing. Healing is a real issue here. Your starting mage, is not terribly powerful and its going to be a long while before he develops anything useful. The end result is that you have to camp for days on end to heal. This requires food. Which the game is quite stingy on passing out. The devs also put in spoiled and poisoned food. Because nothing makes recovering from a hard fight quite as fun as dealing with an entire party dying because the food was spoiled and poisoned. These elements made the game a chore and in the end I have no patience for this style of game anymore. Go back and read the books instead.

This is definitely a game for nostalgia's sake. If you played it in the past, you will most likely enjoy the trip down memory lane into a realm of simplistic controls, pixelated graphics (which don't translate well at all on widescreen and a windowed version is so small you can hardly see what is happening). The storyline might be interesting but the gameplay is so subpar that it's not enjoyable. I'm all for nostalgia, but it works best when you have the foundation that allows you to be nostalgic in the first place. I should have dug deeper to realize it was a DOS-based game before I purchased it. Thankfully, it cost less than a paperback does these days so I can chalk it up as a reminder to go beyond the 5 star nostalgia reviews and determine if it really would be a game I can get into.

I got this game for free when a friend installed a new 4x CD drive on my PC. He said, "I have a tradition of when I upgrade or get a new computer I buy a new game." So he gave me the game and installed it for me. I barely remember it now, it's been so long. I do remember going through caverns. I remember Sierra giving this out as a freebie but it was the Floppy Disk version NOT the CD version. I remember the combat was cell rendered and turn base. Other then that I don't really remember anything about it. Maybe because I was so use to Sierra doing adventure games I thought Dynamix would follow the same theme. It must of not made a big impression on me.

Honestly I think this is one of those games that's rated so high because people are rating it based on nostalgia. Perhaps in 1997 this game was state-of-the-art and there was like nothing like it. But in 2021, it hasn't aged well at all. If you want to play old school RPG's from the 80's and 90's, then I recommend the Ultima and Wizardry series instead of Betrayal at Kronder (or BoK). Both of these series have better gameplay. The only area where BoK is better is the story. I get that older games aren't as polished as more recent games, but it shouldn't be a chore to play the game. And that's exactly my experience with BoK: a boring chore. Initially as I read the game manual and the summary of the Riftwar saga, I was excited. Yes in the 80's and 90's you had to read the manuals or you would be lost in a game. So I fired up the game with great expectations, and after about 6 hours of gameplay I stopped playing. Boring is the best word for my experience. The entire time was spent wandering the map trying to reach the first city. During that time there were combat encounters, but the combat was repetitive and painfully boring. Visiting inns was boring. Discovering villages and knocking on doors was tedious and boring. The dialog and learning the historical background by talking to NPC's was the best part. Many reviewers praised BoK for its depth of gameplay, but after 6 hours of gameplay it was not apparent to me. Perhaps the depth they're talking about develops much later in the game. But in my opinion if I put in 6 hours and a game hasn't at least got some traction to keep my interest, then it's a pretty bad game. This game is dirt cheap, so it's not a big risk trying the game out. But I'd recommend not letting the glowing reviews of nostalgic fans mislead you.

I have never played this game. But maybe someday. Maybe.