Let me start with that it did not age well, probably it was the nostalgia that pulled me back to it. It has a simple storyline for the main quest with lots and lots of grinding. There are lots of side quests but they have no depth: simple fetch/escort/kill missions. The game has so many options that were new at the time, but are done better or more meaningfully since. You could pickpocket, steal, haggle, rent a room, visit mages guild or churches. There are many magic spells for the spellcasters, and magic potions or items for the non-magic users. These are extremely important as different situations or monsters require different sets of defensive/offensive magic. It is a piece of history, the game that started the Elder Scrolls. I would only suggest to retro gaming fanatics, others should look for the later episodes in the series or wait for the OpenTESArena.
As a movie adaptation it fails quite badly, I still remember vaguely the dystopic movie from my childhood and it barely touches the source material. Lots of tiny pieces were used from the movie, but even more were left out. The robots you interact with (instead of people) are bizarre crash test dummies (that's the family friendly description). As a point and click adventure it is very tedious, I never knew whether I've found everything on the screen, it's real pixel hunting. Also all scenes have multiple camera angles and traversing between them is like riding the roller coaster. Many times it was difficult to find right camera angle (especially at a crucial point of the game). The character we play keeps giving us advice about where to look, which is a lazy way of the developers to get away the bad design. Still the hint system is not reliable and in the end I had to look up a walkthrough to understand what did I miss (I'm not proud just wanted to see what will happen in the end). There are also a couple of translation issues, but that's the least of the problems. All in all the gameplay is lacking, there is no atmosphere and it is easy to lose the will to see the story through. The controls are dizzying and confusing at best. The music is a generic soundtrack that adds nothing to the atmosphere (I turned it off after half an hour). The graphics are as expected from a nineties game. I do not suggest this game at all.
I really enjoyed playing such an old game, couldn't wait to beat it the first time! It was a challenge from the start, had to figure out some key bindings, the game is very unforgiving at the beginning. The game really shows that it is a first attempt at making a video game. I also had trouble when I installed the default game and I couldn't progress past the first quest. So better try the extra installers! (I used the windows installer.) The game play is about navigating the map until you find the castle, the nearest dungeon and town. Then you can move between these three ignoring the rest of the map. The dungeon crawling is a bit fun and a bit confusing, lots of monsters and traps around. I even tried drawing a map - but somehow managed to mess it up, like the walls were moving... I died about a dozen times, but then managed to win in the end and I don't regret spending the time on it!
It is an amazing game from the past, I would suggest this to anyone feeling nostalgic about the nineties. I played it for countless of hours alone or hot-seating with my siblings. The comic graphics and beautiful music create a marvellous atmosphere. I don't think there's any strategy fan who haven't heard about this one. I've downloaded with GOG Galaxy and runs without any problems on Windows 10. (Except for the editor, I wasn't able to run it yet.)
