Menzoberranzan - SSI/Mindscape RRP œ44.99
                (RPG on PC floppy or CD-ROM)

     CD-ROM version reviewed by Alex van Kaam on a P90

Menzoberranzan is a city, a city in the Underdark, a city full of
Dark Elves or Drow as they are better known.  These Drow all
belong to certain houses, and each house is plotting against the
other to praise Loth, the Spider queen.

All Drow are evil, they hate elves and aren't to fond of other
races either, their whole life is dedicated to fighting and
killing.  Sometimes they make an expedition to the surface world,
attack some villages, burning them down and taking prisoners.  And
what can the other races do, not much, the best protection that
the Drow have is the radiation that fills the Underdark, all other
races except the Drow and some old mining dwarves are affected by
it, so an expedition from the surface world down to the Underdark
to defeat the Drow is very unlikely.

There is only one exception to all of the Drow and that is Drizzt
from the house of Do'Urden, Drizzt is a Drow who left the
Underdark and who is now living on the surface world.

The story starts as your party is attacking a monster, they kill
it and the local village is giving a large party to honour you,
that same night the Drow attack, they take a lot of villagers
prisoner and set fire to the village.

This is where you step in and the game really starts ...

Before all of this you have to create your party, and this time
there are no cards or Gypsies involved, your two party members are
created in a cave and in the presence of Loth, you can normally
choose your race, class and all the other stuff but it is all done
in a rendered world, you slowly pass large bowls, that are placed
around an altar, it all looks very very nice but it is also very
very slow, so after making a mistake you have to restart the whole
cycle again and this can take a lot of time, still it is a nice
change from all the other routines I have seen.

After this the game starts in the village, those of you who know
Ravenloft 1 will feel immediately at home, the control system is
the same, there are some changes here and there but they just make
it all run a bit smoother.

The first thing you notice are the quicksave and quickload buttons
on the screen, they are very handy but they also make the game a
bit easy. Why ?.... Well after a difficult stage you just click on
the button and your game is saved, it takes only a few seconds and
then you can quickly continue. If this button wasn't there you
would have to go to the option menu and choose a slot, give it a
name and then the game would be saved. Now if you are completely
absorbed by the game, and this does happen, the option menu is
then just too much fuss and you don't save so often until your
party is killed and you come to the conclusion that it has been 2
hours since you last saved ... now this is very frustrating but it
is all part of a good RPG just as making maps and killing
monsters.  (I bet a lot of you are now thinking back to that time
when they went 'AAAAAAAAARGH I haven't saved for that last x
hours.....') So the quicksave button does take away that
frustration but it also means that you are in a way invulnerable.

Anyway, enough on those two buttons on to the rest. The magic
system still works the same, you either memorize for a mage or
pray for a cleric to make their spells available.  Some new spells
have been added, like Jump and Levitate and there are some Drow
spells that come available later on in the game.

The mapping system is very handy, as it was with Ravenloft 1, you
can still add your comments and save them to disk as text files.
But there now also is a option to show the whole map, again making
life easy for the player.  There are also two 'world maps', one
showing you on which stage you are when you are trying to reach
Menzoberranzan and the other showing you Menzoberranzan.

As for the fighting, it works very easily, just hold your mouse
pointer over the enemy and when it changes into a dagger just
click and one of your party members will strike.

Moving around goes best with the numeric keyboard, you can either
choose stepping mode or smooth walking mode, just choose what you
prefer.

And last but not least, the atmosphere, well the graphics and
sound are of good quality, until you reach Menzoberranzan the game
really grabs you with its large (dark) cave system, the monsters,
the subquests and all the items you can find.  In between there
are some nice rendered parts, like your party going down a mine or
changing into a spider.  Then of course add all the interaction of
your party members, they give you hints and they notice walk
through walls.  Once you reach the city add the intrigue of all
the houses and the Drows you meet to it and you get a great
climax.

But not all is well, sometimes I had monsters appear inside a
wall, and in the starting stages I even had to re-install and
restart because one of the buttons, the one showing the world map,
was just gone, loading a previous save game and it was back but
stuck.  This things can get you stuck, you can still kill monsters
in a wall and the world map is just extra, but it just shows that
they didn't do a proper job playtesting the game, the version I'm
running is 1.0.

So to reach the end, I can really recommend this game, that is if
you like AD&D games, it is just that little bit better than
Ravenloft 1, and you can live with the odd glitch.  And if you
want to start on RPG this isn't a bad start, it has a good linear
way to it and it really helps you sometimes.

For GUS owner, there is an easy way to let your Ultrasound work in
native mode with the game, and if you can't I will gladly help
you, just contact me on the address below.

Alex van Kaam
Haydnstr. 18
5751 ES Deurne
Netherlands
4930-13325
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