Ishar 3: The Seven Gates of Infinity

aka: Ishar III: Les sept portes de l'infini, Ishar III: The Seven Gates of Infinity, Ishar-3
Moby ID: 7702
DOS Specs

Description official descriptions

After Zubaran, the Lord of Ishar, has defeated the evil Shandar, peace has returned to the land. Unfortunately, it didn't last for long, since Shandar found a way to retain his spirit, which is looking for a body to possess. Using time manipulation, Shandar is trying to find the dragon of Sith, last survivor of the Great Black Dragons, in order to control his body and execute its immense power for evil purposes. Zubaran has to find companions, use the Portals of Time, explore the land, and get to the Black Dragon before Shandar does.

In this third installment of the Ishar series, the player can control Zubaran or import characters both from Ishar or Ishar 2. The gameplay is very similar to that of the second game. The player recruits companions and navigates the party through 3D environments viewed from first-person perspective. Combat is in real-time, like in the two predecessors. A slight graphical change is the usage of digitized photos as character portraits.

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Screenshots

Promos

Credits (DOS version)

11 People

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 69% (based on 20 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.6 out of 5 (based on 18 ratings with 1 reviews)

Reality bytes!

The Good
At first, everything! I played a demo of this before I finally managed to get my shaky little paws on it. The demo had a band of randomly created adventurers wandering around a deep lush forest. The armour they adorned was superbly crafted, they were bristling with blades and notched tools of bludgeoning. The forest was huge with towering trees and a canopy of green vegetation, the sun piercing the ceiling of leaves with golden shafts of purity. Birds called, insects whirred. We were set upon by a band of armored fiends, with haunting green orbs for eyes, a seemingly demented mage blinded my party and a titanic battle ensued. I was won over, I got the whole version and suddenly reality came crashing down on me.

The Bad
In my humble opinion, this game is truly awful. Truly. I don't even know where to begin. You start off in what seems to be some kind of city, which as you play you discover is actually a devious maze, really devious. I don't know how anyone could live in this place! All the houses are joined together, you can probably hear everything the neighbours say. Whats more the city is populated by cardboard cutouts depicting surreal images of...people. Which don't actually move, but seem rather to shift uncomfortably (and annoyingly) from toe to toe. Progressing through this nightmarish maze/city/playset was excruciating. After this the game just got amazingly worse, my favourite interaction with "Ishar 3" was deleting it from my hard drive.

The Bottom Line
I can't tell you how I would exactly describe it, because I don't think my review would be approved. So to keep it clean, trust me in 1994, they were capable of doing MUCH better. This review is only my own opinion, but from the look of things Silmarils never updated their engine, and just used the same tired formula again and again to finally produce something, very, very, bad.

DOS · by Tiamat (18) · 2003

Trivia

Awards

  • Amiga Joker
    • Issue 02/1995 – #2 Best RPG in 1994 (Readers' Vote)

CD-ROM/Floppy disc version differences

The CD-ROM version of the game is mainly the same as the floppy disc version. The differences are: prerendered 3D animation instead of bitmap screens for the following sequences: Silmarils logo, Opening sequence, Title Screen. Also, in the floppy version there are people wandering in the streets, but you cannot interact with them. In the CD-Rom version they were not implemented.

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  • MobyGames ID: 7702
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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by POMAH.

Atari ST added by Martin Smith. Macintosh added by Terok Nor.

Additional contributors: MAT, Sciere, formercontrib, Patrick Bregger, Simon Carless.

Game added November 6, 2002. Last modified March 22, 2024.