Secret of the Silver Blades

The Good
I found the linear thread of game play easier to follow... fight, next place, fight, next place, upgrade equipment, repeat. The classic dungeon crawl view with the top-down combat view of all Gold Box games is still used and still looks good. I love the ability to move your characters and plan your attacks/defense in the turn-based combat. I can honestly say that I never got bored due to the game being to easy while also not being discouraged with it being too hard.

The Bad
I found some of the battles to be rather lengthy. There were a few bugs but as the main bug actually benefited me I can't complain - one of my characters was granted the effects of a vorpal sword no matter what weapon was used (a vorpal sword has a chance of one-hit decapitation of an enemy).

The Bottom Line
A fun hack and slash romp through 2nd Edition AD&D Forgotten Realms. There are critics that say that by the time this, the third in the series, was released the interface was showing its age but I disagree and feel that the graphics are rather secondary to a well written and diverse game such as this. I also like that no knowledge of the prior games is necessary but it adds a depth if you've played them.

The Good
Its set in the Forgotten Realms and it allows you to import your characters from the last game. The story revolves around a mining town where a Lich and his minions have been frozen in ice. The ice is thawing and the monsters are running amuck. So a lich, the grand daddy of the undead, is the enemy, sounds cool right? Well it ain't.

The Bad
It's amazing how quickly the Gold Box series crashed, even with its aging interface, the first two games were great but this one fell flat on its face.

First off, after building your characters in the first two games, your now powerful and well equiped party is stripped of treasures and levels to a shadow of themselves for the sake of game balance. In the first game, Pool of Radiance, the most deadly area you faced was the undead filled graveyard, it was challenging and scary. Since a lich rules the roost in this game I was expecting all sorts of skeletons, wraiths, vampires and other undead to cause me misery. Instead they strip the characters down and have you fighting your standard D&D monsters. Even with the pumped up characters from Curse of the Azure Bonds, the AD&D system has many powerful monsters which are meant to battle high level characters such as the undead and demons.

Speaking of battling, you will be doing a lot of that in this game. It seems every step you'll take will involve combat and the combat engine gets a little boring after your 50th battle of the day. This wouldn't be so bad if the game had an interesting story to follow but it doesn't. After having great plots in the first two, especially Azure Bonds, this one is dull and uninspired. I didn't feel compelled to help the townspeople. My only motivation was to recover the gear and levels I had lost importing my characters. Your characters are literally picked up and thrown into this situation, there is no solid link with where the last game leaves off and this one.

Also what is annoying about this game is how they waste the great Forgotten Realms setting. The other games had you interacting with places in this fantasy world that appear in the books and modules. This one throws you up into a remote mining village, which could for all purposes be located in the Rockie Mountains, Planet Earth, not Forgotten Realms.

The Bottom Line
The game's heavy combat emphasis combined with a weak story makes it hard to play this game. If there was a solid continuation of where the plot in Azure Bonds left off then this game would be a lot more fun to play. Instead your characters are stripped down to their underwear and thrown into a series of never ending battles. B-O-R-I-N-G please skip this game unless you are die hard AD&D fan.