Darklands - MicroProse RRP œ49.99 (RPG for PC) Reviewed by Roy Sims MicroProse have a strong reputation for high quality flight simulations (like F-19 and F15 II) and strategy games (like Civilization and Railroad Tycoon). Now they have entered the computer role playing game market with Darklands, a game that they have been advertising for the last six months at least. I had almost given up hope of seeing it this side of Christmas, but it has finally appeared. A while ago I reviewed 'Ultima Underworld' and drew attention to the hardware requirements needed to run the game. Well, Darklands also has high expectations of your PC. It must be a 386 or 486 PC with 2MB of RAM, a VGA graphics card, DOS 5.0 (or equivalent) and 17.5 mb of hard disk space. The version I bought came on ten high density 1.44mb 3.5" disks. Installation took about twenty minutes but thankfully it was simple and painless. According to the box, Darklands is "Heroic Role-Playing in Medieval Germany" (15th Century). What this means is that all of the towns and events are inspired or based on myths and legends from that period of time in Germany, so we have wolves, boars, bears, giant spiders, werewolves, ogres and the like. A large colour fold out map comes with the game showing the 90 or so visitable areas. The aim of Darklands is to gain a good (high) reputation across the whole of Germany and thus become famous. This is achieved by gaining a reputation in each town or village by completing various small and not so small quests. Some will be easy, some will be difficult. So, how does Darklands treat the genre compared to other CRPGs? Well, it has a number of different displays and environments on offer. When you are in a town or village you can wander around visiting guilds, markets, inns and so forth by selecting them from a list (just like the kind of multiple choice situations you find in any of those fighting fantasy books). Other options then become available as a result. The outcome of your choices varies depending on the stats of your party. Just like in real RPGs, your characters' attributes and skills affect the outcome of many events and something that doesn't work early on might come off later when your characters have gained more experience in the relevant field. As an example, I visited a particular Guild early on in a town called Posen to see if they had any quests my party could undertake. We were basically laughed at and thrown out onto the street. However, later on (after we had completed a few trivial local quests and defeated some night robbers) we returned with our local reputation up to the 'respected' level and we were welcomed in and given the details of a worthy quest to perform in return for a grand reward and fame. However, there is a subtle difference in the way a player's stats improve. Darklands does not allow your players' attributes (strength, endurance etc.) to improve. They might be able to temporarily go above their maximum total thanks to a potion or by praying to a saint, but otherwise they will remain as they are. The argument is that characters becoming stronger due to experience isn't really very realistic. In contrast, skills can improve all the time, because we all know that practice makes perfect. I'm not so sure I like this, because all it means is that you must give as many points as possible (up to the maximum allowed) to endurance and strength to give you a chance of surviving early on in the game. The Quick Start characters that you can choose as default are not particularly well endowed in these two attributes so you're better off creating your own. Money has an important effect. Armour, weapons and other items must be bought and sold. You can pay to stay in an inn for a nights rest and a good meal. You can also stay for a while and relax, regain lost strength or even take up jobs to bring some money in (recession obviously wasn't about in the 15th Century!). You can also lose money by being attacked and defeated by robbers. Unfortunately, the money system isn't decimal. It's very much like our old system in the pre-1971 days (you know - 12 thingamybobs make a whatsit, 20 whatsits make an doobery etc). It takes a while to get used to it, as does the system of time which is also completely different to anything I know (although I think it might be Latin). There are numerous locations to visit within a town or city. Churches offer you the chance to attend mass, go to confession or talk to the local clergymen to see if there are any quests that need doing. Obviously, there is a point to doing all this. Skills like virtue and religion can be increased if you do it often enough. There are also markets (containing various Guilds), Docks and much more besides. One thing you do notice travelling from place to place is that they are all very similar. The backdrops to the multiple choices lists are very good, almost watercolour paintings in appearance but they remain the same no matter where you visit. The main market in Posen looks the same as the one in Thorn, and Kuttenburg etc. Most of the small quests are similar too. The names might change but that's about all. Leaving a town or city will take you to the outside map. Your party is now represented by a man who would be a giant if everything was to scale. You now guide him to the next destination by clicking on the relevant map area. En route anything can happen. You can be ambushed by thieves, attacked by wild boars or stalked by walking trees to name but a few. You can camp on the land to rest but don't do it for too many days else the local landlord might send someone out to chase you off. Whenever these situations happen the game will either switch to the backdrop and multiple choice display, or if you are entering into combat you will see the isometric view. Combat is very important in Darklands, mainly because it happens so often, (although it isn't anywhere as frequent as in Mindscape's 'Legend'). The view switches to an inside or outside isometric view. It starts off 'paused' so that you can assign your orders to each character in turn. There are four standard attacking orders plus throw (for potions) and missile (for missile weapons like crossbows etc). Once you're happy with the orders for each party member you hit the space bar to initiate the turn. The attackers will now come forward and the fighting commences. You can end the turn by hitting space whenever you want and assign new orders if you like. If you're lucky and you survive, you will get the chance to pick up any items left behind by the dead attackers and some skills will increase as a result of the victory. Unfortunately, I found this a little bit remote and felt that I had little real influence over the outcome once the fighting had started. If a character kills a foe, he (or she) will turn to fight another. Once they've started it seems impossible to assign them a different target to attack. This makes it hard to help out another party member who might be in trouble during a fight. In most cases, once the fight is over then the display switches to a screen similar to the trading screens where you can get any items the dead foes have left behind. It then goes back to the normal text multiple choice options. However, sometimes you get the chance to explore in this environment. This only seems to apply when in keeps or castles but I might be wrong. When this happens you can open doors, open chests, disarm traps etc. depending on your skills and attributes. This is a little more interesting but I've never yet survived to tell the tale! Often you have to work your way down through various levels of a keep and end up coming face to face with many bandits or thieves who are much stronger and better equipped than you are! You are not permitted to save when inside, which is a pain in the neck as you have no idea how large the area is. One thing I haven't mentioned yet is the overwhelming number of attributes and skills available to each character. There are seven basic attributes (endurance, strength, agility, intelligence etc) and 19 skill stats that include seven different weapon skills, plus skills like alchemy, religion, virtue, healing, riding and so on. What's more they all seem to come into play depending on the circumstances. Each character has their own screen detailing these along with any equipment they possess (clothing, weapons, shields), any potion formulas and whether they pray to any saints for divine intervention. Creating characters can be done at the start of the game or when at an inn. The nice thing about being able to create characters of your own is that you can create more than the four needed. When at an inn you can (if you want) retire any of the current party and bring in other characters you've created in their place. It is even possible to return to that inn later on and recruit the retired character back into the party. You can also create new characters on the spot if any of the party have died and you don't have any pre-prepared people to hand. This is just like in real RPGs where a player's character has died and the DM allows them to role a new one so they can continue in the game. I've only really scratched the surface of the things on offer in Darklands. It is obvious that the designers have played real RPGs and come up with a wish list of "wouldn't it be nice to be able to do this...". The spec for the game sounds like a CRPG's dream come true. Unfortunately, it doesn't all smell of roses. There are a couple of aspects of the game that I don't like. The first is the documentation. The manual was obviously written and finished long before the game was, and this leads to several inconsistencies. The separate guide does cover them but it is annoying to have to constantly check both at the same time to get the whole picture. The most obvious discrepancy is the lack of a load option from within the game, despite what the manual says. Also, if your party dies then the game suddenly dumps back to DOS without even a message or a screen to greet your failure. The main manual fails to describe things in the order that you need to know them, so again you have to go back and forth through it before finding what you need to know. There are even some aspects that I haven't found yet - including the effect of horses when travelling on the map. They don't seem to speed up travel time and the only time they are apparently utilised is as an option in the list when trying to escape from wild boars in the wilderness. The second aspect of Darklands that somewhat ruins the game for me are the numerous mini-bugs and sloppy inconsistencies. I get the impression that MicroProse decided to release it despite the problems I am about to describe. Any competent tester could find the following in five minutes flat: many mini-quests can be repeated over and over again immediately after completing them. For example, you can do a quest to rid a building of spiders. Whether they are giant ones that need fighting or small ones that don't, you can complete the quest then go back to the same man and do it again. The text behaves as if you've never met each and every time you do it. The same happens elsewhere. The colour palette on the outside map is known to change colour all on its own. The windows that pop open and close on the player's attributes and skills screens can screw up at times. I'm also still very puzzled and annoyed at my reputation in the town I'm in right now, because it keeps resetting to 0 and I don't know why. The manual tells you that it can go as high as 99 or as low as -99, but it doesn't say what can make your reputation drop. I suspect it's a bug, and if it is what's the point in carrying on? Once (after a particularly unfair and nasty fight) three of my four adventurers died yet the text continued as if they were still alive. It even had them talking at one point! (The most ironic part of all this is that the main manual has a couple of pages of 'Designer's notes'. This is a message from the programmers and designers about how the game came about etc. It states at one point "...there was a great temptation to either give up or "publish whatever we've got", regardless of quality". I get the impression that they have published it prematurely.) I was looking forward to Darklands and I have to say that reading the specification of the game it sounds brilliant. In practice however it does become repetitive. After all, the quests are going to be very similar wherever you go and there are 90 odd locations to visit in Germany that aren't going to look or feel any different. The desire to see my party grow in fame and strength might be enough to keep me going for now, but will I be playing it in a few weeks time? I honestly couldn't tell you. I think it's the sort of game that I'll play for a few days then put away and return to a month or so later. Technically Darklands doesn't do anything special, but then again neither did Railroad Tycoon or Civilization and look how many people enjoyed those. It must be said that the graphic intro at the beginning of the game is terrible and whoever did the graphics should be thoroughly ashamed. On one screen I was convinced that the graphics must have corrupted but they weren't corrupted, they were just drawn that way! The multiple choice style menus are a bit long in the tooth but the designers seem to think it gives them freedom to do anything. If that's the case, why do the same quests happen over and over again in different locations, especially when the game takes up 17.5mb on the hard disk? The encounters outside also seem to be very random. I often bumped into the same band of weary travellers en route to a city that I had just escorted them to the day before! The manual drops a hint that there might be sequels or data disks in Medieval Europe to look forward to. I haven't seen any glossy magazine reviews yet but it will be interesting to see if they over hype this game like they did with 'Shadowlands' (which was terrible). It sounds good on paper, but it isn't that good in practice. MicroProse's technical support people have admitted to me that they knew of a couple of the bugs I've found and a new version (version 6) should be available by the time you read this, incorporating the load feature that was missing. You should contact them first before sending any disks back for upgrading. I don't know if any of the bugs I found will be cured though. It would be outrageous whatever the price of the software, but at a retail price of œ49.99 (or œ44.99 or less depending on where you get it) it just underlines the fact that MicroProse haven't taken the same stand on quality with their first CRPG as they have with their military simulators. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Darklands IBM PC review update By Roy Sims Upgrade or retrograde? To get your Darklands PC updated to the latest version you won't need to send your disks back. A patch disk is available from Microprose if you phone and speak to their customer support department. To see if you need the patch disk you must know which version of the software you've bought. To check the version number you have to be very quick. When you load the game from hard disk a grey box with white text appears for a few short seconds on screen. On here you will see a number. If you've got 483.051 or below then you'll need the patch disk to upgrade it to 483.06. When you eventually receive the patch disk, you must copy the new files into the directory on your hard disk which contains the original game. Typing UPDATE begins the process which takes about five minutes to complete. So what does the patch disk do? Well, the load feature is now implemented which means you don't have to quit to DOS and load in a save game from the start every time. The read me text mentions that various bug fixes have been made and some new and/or revised artwork has been included. Forgive me for sounding cynical but it appears that Microprose not only released Darklands knowing that it was still riddled with bugs, but they released it unfinished too! This is probably the biggest sin a software company can commit in the eyes of the buying public, especially when their standard PC price point is now between 45-50 pounds a time. Does the patch make any real difference to the product I hear you ask? Well, not really. A few of the bugs I found in the original seem to have disappeared and (as I've already mentioned) the load option is now in, but these are superficial. The game still feels the same as it did before even if it doesn't screw up like it used to. I think I've spotted some of the extra artwork in the churches and cathedrals section but I might be mistaken. Oh, I forgot to mention in the main review that apparently Darklands does not have a specific ending. A read me file (there are quite a few with this game!) states that once you've done x, y and z you've pretty much done all that there is to do, but the game won't end. I don't know about you, but I prefer a game with an ending - even if it isn't a very good one!