Path: news.uh.edu!barrett From: teler@cs.huji.ac.il (Eyal Teler) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: MINI-REVIEW: Legacy of Soracil (demo) Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.games Date: 17 May 1994 17:17:48 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 88 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <2rau7s$or3@masala.cc.uh.edu> Reply-To: teler@cs.huji.ac.il (Eyal Teler) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Keywords: game, demo, role-playing, adventure, commercial Originator: barrett@karazm.math.uh.edu PRODUCT DETAILS This is a mini-review of the demo version of Legacy of Soracil, an isometric role-playing adventure game ("RPG"). The demo contains one game level and appears on the coverdisk of the May issue of Amiga Computing magazine. REVIEW The game loads from the diskette, and reasonably quickly. You are greeted with a nice musical score. It's one of the better ones I've heard in a game in some time. Of course, I usually play only demos, so I may be missing something. The magazine contains instructions on creating your characters and starting the game, using the options accessible from the opening screen. The music continues to play until the game starts. Character generation is done on two separate screens. The first lets you select four characters from those available, which are basically warriors and mages. The second screen allows you to change the attributes of the characters by adding up to five points divided among five attributes. There are two annoying things here. The first is that you don't know the attributes of the characters when selecting them, and you find this out only in the second screen. The second thing is that the characters are not coloured in the modification screen, and so I wasn't sure which one of them I was changing (some look about the same, apart from their colours). On starting the game, after selecting the destination (which always brings you to the same place -- it's a demo, after all), you see your characters in not-so-glorious isometric form. Each character gets a turn with a limited number of movement units. When the character can no longer move, you should switch to the next one, but it's possible to switch before this. I found it rather annoying to have to move each character individually, especially as the game forces you to switch, so you can't just explore freely with one character nor in a group. The controls also let the game down. First of all, it's not all that easy to go where you want. In one place, where there are narrow corridors, I found myself going back and forth because I didn't press the right place on the screen (which was difficult because the screen is cluttered by walls). Battles are also not very well done, as you have to select repeatedly the character you wish to fight. As it happens, if you click on your enemy without selecting the 'fight' option, you could move to a place where you can't attack it (and in any case you lose movement units). There are some traps in the game. Once they are sprung they are still active, and anyone stepping on them is hit, so beware. I think that the only way to avoid this is to find another route. When you are in battle, the game gives combat turns to your enemies. First an enemy is shown moving on the map, and then a short combat scene is shown. This means that the game moves constantly between map display and game display. The graphics in the game are not all that brilliant. In fact, they are quite bland. To let you view things hidden by walls, walls become ghosted and then turn back to normal, which is quite logical, but not perfectly executed (although I can't point to the exact fault). There are reasonable sound effects, but the music is missing in the demo. The full game has the option of selecting either music or effects; I didn't search for this option in the demo. CONCLUSION This game seems to make all the efforts to slow you down. Exploration and battles are the meat of RPGs, and the controls of this game make them a chore. It's the first isometric RPG I've played, and it just can't compare to first person perspective RPGs, which I like very much. Still, it seems that the problem is not the isometric nature of the game, but the controls. Anyway, I might put it occasionally just to listen to the music. COPYRIGHT NOTICE This review was written by Eyal Teler. If you really want to copy it (why?) then you are free to do it. Just don't change it. --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews