Game:

Darklands (1992)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 20:33

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What is Darklands?

In Medieval Germany, things aren't always as they seem. There have been rumors of witch gatherings in the plans to summon demons and darkness to the world, Raubritters make travel difficult, some villages have turned away from Christianity to practice Satanism because of demons, and to top it all off, dragons have been spotted in certain parts of the country. Meanwhile, in an uncertain city, unaware of the troubles that plague Germany, have decided to do good, to avoid evil, and bring everlasting fame and honor to their names, they're just unaware that all of the above is going to be how they go about doing it, in addition to a few other small things that will almost certainly crop up along the way.

Create a party of up to four adventurers of your choosing, and watch as they battle bandits, witches, raubritters, and even demons and dragons. In addition to a style of battle system that would be made famous in the Infinity Engine games (Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, and Icewind Dale 1 and 2), the game plays out like a Visual Novel at certain points, usually when the player's characters come to a spot where they must decide upon a choice.

Although Darklands wasn't the first Open World game (games like the Ultima Series, The Legend of Zelda, The Fairy Tale Adventure and the like all came before it) Darklands does it closest to best, I think. Case in point, whenever the player's party comes upon a problem, there are usually numerous ways to solve it, and it depends upon the skills that the player decided that his party would have. For example, if your characters all have high skills in weapons only, then usually battle is going to be your only way out. But if you gave your face character a high Charisma stat and invested several points into his Speak Common skill, then he'll have a shot at being able to talk his and his companions' way out of the problem. If you have potions, you can use one of those, if your character has a high enough Thrown Weapon skill. Or, if your knowledgeable enough about one of the many Christian Saints and have a high enough Virtue skill, you can call on them to get you out of trouble. I love this, as I feel that this gives Darklands an immense amount of replay value, especially since there really is no wrong way to build one's party up.

The game has excellent music whenever there is any music, it sounds good. Even better, the version of Darklands I'm playing is configured with the sound card needed to make the character fight sounds sound like music. One time I played this game in the past, I think the characters in my party made a suspiciously-similar sounding theme to the Super Mario Bros. theme.

The graphics in the game aren't amazing, by any means, but they're not totally abyssmal, and they could always be worse, but hey, at least not everything is text-based, so there's that.

Unfortunately, for as much as I love Darklands, I'm not about to let it slide without mentioning its faults and flaws. First one is that there is no story. Literally. If you came into this game expecting some grand story of heroics and the like, then you will be left massively dissapointed. While there is some small semblance to story later on, you really have to jump through some hoops to get it started, and the game doesn't really tell you what those hoops are, exactly. Another problem is the lack of an in-game journal system, and I know that those weren't terribly common at the time, but this is one game where it is sorely needed. If you're playing this game with me, then for the love of God Almighty and His disciples I hope and pray you're writing down notes in a notebook, because the game isn't going to give you anymore clues to go on after you've been told the first time. Lastly is the Copy Protection that the game uses. You would think it would have been circumvented by now, or removed altogether, but it's still in there, and if you want to go adventuring beyond the city gates that you start out in, then you better be a guru of medieval alchemy symbols or get ahold of that code sheet, otherwise you won't be getting far.

There is so much more I could say about this game at this point, but I'm already over 4,200 characters for this description, but I'll end it with this: for a game that cost $3,000,000 to make and nearly bankrupted Microprose, it shows a lot of promise. It's just such a shame that they had to either scrap, cut out, or couldn't implement all the ideas and other countries that they wanted to include in the game, and that's not to mention the buggy state that Darklands was released in. But what we do have here in Darklands currently is fantastic, and while it everything that was going to be in the game isn't here, I and countless others still love it for what it has to offer. If you enjoy watching numbers go up at random intervals, then grab this game, otherwise you should avoid it like the plague.

#darklands
#pergasus

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