I bought the game in my quest to own legal copies of all the games I played in my youth, but I'd suggest modern players to stay away from this game. The graphics are a-OK for a 1989 PC game (that is, functional but surely not gorgeous), the PC speaker music is grating and the controls are not that smooth. Worst of all, however, is the not-adjustable and horribly hard difficulty of the game, that is guaranteed to offer you many hours of frustration. There are six mini games and to win you are basically forced to get a perfect score in at least five of them. However, you only have 1-3 lives in each game, after which you are forced to play the next one. This makes it very hard to get good in any of them, as one has not sufficient time to practice, and forces the player, more often than not, to continue playing in “walking dead” scenarios where they have no chance left to win the game. Three stars because 8-yeard-old me spent some time playing this game, so there is some entertainment factor. But nowadays, apart for nostalgia factors, there is simply no reason to approach it.
I'm a big lover of the old Black Isle titles, BG, BG2 and especially Torment. Here I see much of their ingredients except the most important one: the role-playing. You simply walk forward, on rails, without being able to make a real choice, even of exploring area X before Y or vice versa. It seems to be living in the satyrical "DM of the Rings" comic. Nothing to complain instead about the engine: the graphic is the prized 2D-isometric which I find more effective and elegant than the current 2,000,000,000 4-D polygons, and the battles are like they should be. So, if you like clashing and maiming and couldn't care less about the story, play this and you won't be disappointed. But I have different tastes...
