A game series that still shamelessly compares itself to classics like Ultima and Baldur's Gate still fails utterly to grasp what made them great. It's website also slams Diablo as a sign of everything wrong with modern RPGs (which isn't wrong in my book,) but ironically manages to capture everything that made Diablo a shallow loot-grinding click-fest, itself. Enemy AI is still rudimentary, and just runs straight at you. All enemies are still just melee or "ranged", which is melee that stops a little further away. All enemies are just the same enemy with more hit points. Combat from the start to the end of the game is the same; As a wizard, you even use the same basic fire spells, because there's no reason to upgrade! The dumb-as-bricks AI is so easy to outwit, and tactics are so based upon just min-maxing one combat style, you will learn everything you need to know to beat the hardest enemies fighting your first rat in the first sewers. Hint: you regenerate, and enemies don't. You regenerate even while outrunning enemies, and no enemy can run faster than you or cross a map transition. There are also no time limits, you get free stuff for camping, including random monsters who drop loot, and if it ever gets tough, just run away and camp some more! The game also has blindly random loot drops based solely upon CHARACTER level, meaning a random rain barrel outside the local bar has as much chance of having a plate armor as locked chest guarded by traps and monsters at the back of a dungeon. For that matter, random low-level goblins can drop top-level adamantine axes if you camp for more random encounters, and camping generates free loot and EXP. Sure, you CAN explore the nooks and crannies, but why bother, when there's more and better loot to be had just spamming the sleep button? This is a game of boredom more than challenge. It would have been better made procedurally, and you're better off playing a free roguelike game than this.
This is another amateur RPG that tries to mimic the motions of the giants whose shoulders they stand upon, but who fundamentally don't understand why the originals worked. Since the first game, all that has changed is that additional random mechanics of better games have been poorly aped without understanding how to make them work, much less fixing the problems of the first game. Now, you have food and hunger, but there's a survival skill that lets you find infinite fruit and reindeer meat out in the middle of the desert because it doesn't bother to check the surroundings before giving you infinite free stuff. The game still pretends to be a "difficult" "tactical" game, but the AI is still incapable of anything but moving blindly randomly or directly at you like it's borrowed its AI from DOOM. Like DOOM, all the enemies are basically the same AI and have no special abilities to make any one enemy anything but a different graphic on an old enemy with slightly more HP. Even from the start of the game, the I-take-a-turn-you-take-a-turn mechanics mean you can kite enemies to the map edge, and abuse regeneration to win every fight. If that isn't enough, the PLAYER is the only one with a "haste" potion/spell, which makes kiting everything laughably easy, and puts all notion of difficulty to shame, especially since a meager few skill points are needed for infinite free potion ingredients (and food) by camping. The story is a shamelessly rehashed cliche of an evil sorcerer that wants 4 orbs of power, but tries to be "original" by doing Wizardry 7/8's schtick and making space aliens and technology disguised as magic. There's also only about 15 pages of total text in the whole game. This game is neither hard nor old-school, it is just boring. There are MUCH better games available at GOG, including most of the games this one wishes it were. There are much better games for free, including many roguelikes. There are much better RPG Maker games than this!
The developers claim it is "old-school" "like Ultima" and is "better than new-school trash like Diablo" (which isn't even in the same genre as this), but there's no real comparisons, as there is none of the depth of Ultima in this game, and frankly, if Diablo were turn-based and single-player only, with no extra depth added, it would still be more robust than this game. (And I say that as someone who hates clickfest RPGs...) As far as I can tell "old-school" is just code for "lacking originality", because it fails to grasp why the older games were good games. This game pretends to have deep choices, but what it really comes down to is that you make a character and min/max a weapon skill or magic (wizard or cleric magic, real original,) and then start killing things. Most other skills are of marginal importance, except for stealth, which, when upgraded high enough, makes you invincible because the AI is too rudimentary to find you. AI is the critical downfall of this game. There are no enemy wizards or special ability users, nearly all enemies are melee fighters whose AI consist of moving straight up next to you and attacking until someone dies. (The others are "archers" that stop 3 spaces away, but are otherwise the same.) It uses an I-move-you-move turn system with no speedy enemies, so you can literally win every fight by out-walking the enemy and abusing regeneration. The "plot" is paper-thin. Bad guy wants 4 magic orbs. Yawn. Also, they put some woman on the logo, which is strange because it's impossible to play a woman in the first game for no comprehensible reason. It's essentially the most rudimentary roguelike done wrong without even the advantage of procedural content. If you are at all interested in this game, go play a roguelike, many of which are free or cheaper than this, and modern roguelikes have graphics. I presume most players of this game don't realize roguelikes nowadays have graphics, and that's the only reason they play this game.
