Darklands Retrospective Review
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The folks over at The Escapist recently sat down with MPS Labs' RPG classic Darklands, and while they refer to the two weeks of gameplay as a "fumbling" experience due to its outdated controls, they nevertheless extoll the game's virtues in every way within this retrospective review. A fistful of paragraphs:
The amount of freedom the game allows you in completing this task is more than a tad wonderful. From the word go you can pretty much wander around anywhere you want. Granted, doing so early in the game is an easy way to get yourself killed, but after you get a bit stronger you can literally waste hours just walking from location to location, exploring the world and responding to random events, of which there are many.
You'll also, of course, spend a lot of time fighting which is another one of the game's strong suits. While there is a certain level of repetition you'll have to make peace with, Darklands combat is generally fun, employing a system none-too-different from later genre standards like Baldur's Gate. Battles are fought in real-time from an isometric-ish perspective and allow the player to pause time to make tactical decisions. These decisions, admittedly, aren't always the most complex. In fact, outside of using alchemy potions to augment your warriors and attack your opponent, the most you're going to have to do in a majority of battles is pick which enemy you're going to gang up on and pick off first. Even so, it was rare that I'd stumble into a fight and find myself sighing over the prospect of killing another group of bandits
And even if the combat isn't always complex, it's more than capable of kicking your ass if you fight stupidly. The game has no qualms about punishing your mistakes, whether they're simply pushing your characters too hard, equipping them improperly, or engaging in a fight that you should know you're too weak to handle. I learned fast, for instance, to avoid contact with giant spiders whenever possible (forgive me Gregor, I hope they ate you quickly).
More entertaining for me than the combat, however, were the actual elements of role-playing involved in the game. It's no secret that a lot of early RPGs were made very much in homage to classic tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons and its ilk. Darklands is probably the closest I've ever come in a video game to feeling like I was sitting at the table of an actual pen and paper RPG. The building of a character is remarkably in-depth, giving you control over their age, gender, career (back story material if there ever was any) and, of course, their various attributes and skills.
