Quests are bland affairs where an NPC tells you to fetch some gizmo or other by slaughtering one pack of goblins, or skeletons, or spiders, or—insert stock RPG monster here—after another. Extra points have to be given for admitting in the opening cinematic that the adventure to come is one long dungeon crawl, but it’s hard to dish out praise for coming clean over a total lack of inspiration.Įven if the story was the second coming of Lord of the Rings, it wouldn’t compensate for confusing dungeons with no automap. Plot is the usual claptrap about warring factions, artifacts of power, and a chosen one prophesied to save an Acme Brand medieval fantasy world. Everything in Dungeon Lords has been done before, and RPG veterans will easily pick out what Dungeon Lords has borrowed from Diablo, scarfed from Nox, and purloined from Arx Fatalis, etc. If you’re still hanging in there waiting for a twist about a good plot or interesting multiplayer (although the game is more bearable when sharing the misery with a friend while playing co-op), there is no happy ending. Magoo), and the occasional moment when the weight of all this crap causes the game to collapse to the desktop. If not for crates—and there are more of them here than in the closing scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark—and chests, the game would have almost no furnishings at all.Īnd what would an incomplete game be without bugs? Aside from the insta-crashing that accompanied every Alt-Tab to the desktop (which, in fairness, is mentioned in the manual as a no-no, but come on, this is 2005), there’s flickering with multiple versions of NVIDIA drivers and frequent freezes that seemed like loading pauses without the courtesy of a graphic saying “Loading.†There’s also physics that bounce monsters up walls, tiny text locked at 640×480 (so forget about higher resolutions unless you want to turn into Mr. Towns are practically deserted, and rooms and corridors are nearly devoid of graphical detail. Most of the buttons on the character creation screen are blanked out, so you can’t use pregenerated heroes or customize faces, color, and hair, as detailed at length in the manual.įorget about calling up the automap, no matter how many times you hit the “M†key—it ain’t there. Many features described in the manual aren’t present in the actual game. It was obviously booted out the door with little attention to quality control, let alone the spit and polish expected of a modern RPG. Both attempts at returning to hack-and-slash glory are derailed by dated gameplay, wonky controls, and more bugs than an orc’s loincloth.ĭungeon Lords is so embarrassingly unfinished that both Bradley and publisher DreamCatcher should be ashamed for releasing it. Dungeon Lords, an action RPG in the tradition of Diablo, shares much with Bradley’s last effort, the disappointing 2000 release Wizards & Warriors. But that was a long time ago, 1988 through 1992, to be exact. In partnership with the late, lamented Sir-Tech Software, he created one of the finest computer RPG trilogies ever made in Wizardry V, VI, and VII. Bradley was once a force to be reckoned with in roleplaying game design. This Diablo chicken lost its head sometime during production.ĭ.W.
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