Darklands

Apesar de não ser meu gênero favorito, Darklands é um excelente RPG do início dos anos 90. Horas e horas de jogo, todos os dias, ininterruptamente. Adeus amizades. Uma história, milhares de possibilidades. Dezenas de personagens com dezenas de características totalmente diferentes. Nenhuma pode ser negligenciada. Força bruta, diversos tipos de armas e diversas armas de cada tipo. Alquimia, todo tipo de fórmula para qualquer situação. E todo tipo de componente para poder fazer suas fórmulas. Alguns extremamente difíceis de encontrar. Favor divino e os santos podem te salvar. Trabalhe a ganhe seu dinheiro para comprar armas, componentes, ensinamentos, conhecimento. Dezenas e dezenas de cidades na Alemanha Medieval. Transforme seu time em heróis legendários. Ou em bandidos merecedores da morte!

I loved this game when it first came out. the style and the graphics were very good at the time. I, of course, had to download it and try it again when it saw it here. Unfortunately , it is dated and the controls are a bit difficult. Still, I wish that someone would update this game. The game play was great, and the alchemy was very good.

A unique game. Difficult, unforgiven, and with a manual you must read, Darklands offers a flexible RPG unlike anything else. Set in Medieval Germany, with a premise that if the people of the 15th century believed it was real, it was. Alchemy, praying for intercession with saints, a combat session that made sense with different armour, and an open-ended sandbox, it's an amazing game. Highly recommend. But remember, it's not a game that holds your hand.

After playing this game for several hours I am certain I have been dead for 500 years and am entertaining my ancestral ghosts. What a blast from history! A lot went into this game.

C'mon,we need a remake!

[h3]Innovative? Yes! Good? No![/h3] You may have heard how this game did a lot of stuff way ahead of its time (realtime-with-pause, historical realism, procedural generation, open world sandbox, crafting…). It was a big deal back then, one of the most expensive games of its time, a lot of hype, etc. What you may have not heard is that the game does all of that [i]pretty badly.[/i] The world is shallow and repetitive. Everything is almost the same in any city, with some small and often insignificant variation. Character creation is great, one of the best parts. Character development? A series of repetitive loops to increase your numbers. I’m on a streak of old-school RPGS and remembered playing this one in the late 90’s, stopping at the first “true” dungeon. So I tried the game again and spent most of my time doing these repetitive loops, training in inns and fighting the same enemies all night long. Oh, and retrieving/redistributing my ammo, until I just scrapped missile weapons, because they aren’t worth the trouble. But I really wanted to go deeper in the game this time, and finish at least that one dungeon. The controls and combat are atrociously bad, it’s difficult to go “tactical”, then after a while you just stop to care and let the combat kind of auto-resolve (the game is quite easy on normal difficulty). No Infinity engine wet dreams here, combat is more an annoyance that you do because you have to than something fun. Gear progression is very limited, you can get all you ever want after a few hours, and from there you can get only nearly-irrelevant increases in quality. Money also gets irrelevant as soon as you understand how certain quests work and get rich overnight finishing a single one. Hunting for alchemy suplies? Well, why not just buy potions and call it a day? Then, when I finally decided to go to the dungeon… Oh boy, I recalled why I quit that fist time. Having to maneuver you group of idiots with terrible pathfinding that get stuck everywhere is the exact opposite of fun. To get things worst, there are traps that you cannot disarm, and all you can do is to spend a lot of time carefully making every character separately walk around them. Or just forget it and walk right over them, it’s not that the damage matters anyway. At least there are some puzzles. I even had five minutes of fun with them! But after several times pushing myself to keep going through sheer hate power, I just let it go (yeah, without finishing the dungeon). So, in short: repetitive tasks, bad combat, terrible exploration, unrewarding progression. After you first rush of discovering the game's systems, there no payoff to keep you going. Some “main” questlines scattered around, but no incentives at all to go after them. If you are interested in gaming history, it may be worth a few bucks to experience it. If you are looking for a “good old game”, look elsewhere. Did I say that the game also [i]looks terrible[/i], even for early 90’s standard? If you don’t want your eyes to bleed trying to read the text, I advise to use DOSBox scalers. The “advmame3x” worked best for me, but play it in DOSBox-Daum so you can mess around with the options while in-game. DOSBox-Daum is also one of the reasons why this is a rare case of an old game with a better Steam version than GOG.

Awesome vintage game. Still as engaging as it was when I first played it in 1992. Love it. Thank you Mr. Hendrick.