Ultima II: The Revenge of the Enchantress Review
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Should you find yourself contemplating a reinstall of any of the earlier portions of Richard Garriott's Ultima series, you may want to consider reading through this retrospective review of Ultima II: The Revent of the Enchantress to help influence your decision on which installment to begin with. I'll leave you with a few paragraphs:
A great deal of the in-game logic actually FEELS like it was written in BASIC. Items in the game are a simple list with quantity values, most of the NPC's just spout the same dialogue unless they're a special one (drawn from a table), and a lot of the (three disks of content) are just extra maps that aren't necessary to finish the game. This makes perfect sense to me; once you got your map loader written and working, you're like (Okay I'll just make up a TON of maps and stuff for people to explore and bulk things up!)
Actual game play, once you know the controls, isn't too bad. The game is very crisp and responsive, and combat, while absurdly simple, is quick and easy. Initially you spend a lot of time stealing food and just waiting for a frigate to come along. Once you have one of those and the ship's cannons, the game gets VERY easy and you'll level up fast. The whole (time gate mystery) the manual espouses turns out to be pretty simple; the gates do open and close at intervals but their target locations are fixed, so it's not difficult to figure out. On the downside, you spend 90% of your time grinding for gold to buy hit points and ability score increases. A hex editor would let you skip all of this in seconds.
Probably the worst thing about the game is that the 3D dungeons/towers, which is really what Ultima was originally built around, are absolutely unnecessary. The only reason to enter them is to get fuel for the rocket, and that can also be gained by just killing monsters around. So a whole portion of the game is just a waste of time. The fact that magic spells ONLY work in dungeons or towers also makes playing a spell-casting class pointless. Ultima would continue to use 3D dungeons for three more games, which was always a detriment. (If you want a 3D dungeon game, play Wizardry. They do it the best.)
