Ahriman's Prophecy

The Good
... most of what Inderanta says is untrue - monsters do carry cash, you can buy equipment, you get to choose your form of attack, etc. The playability can be a bit laggy at times, but hey, it's freeware, you don't expect miracles. Aveyond (from the same developer) has better playability. It's a big, fun game with lots of puzzles, and the developer runs a forum to provide tips and a run-through. All in all, not bad for the price of £0.00.

The Bad
See above - I don't really have any other quibbles. You might like to download an extra 'patch', otherwise the very end of the game is a bit anti-climactical. But that's all.

The Bottom Line
See above.

The Good
First thing's first. Nice music, nice graphics. I wonder why a lot of freeware games these days seem to have incredible music and well as sound. Quite odd considering a lot of commercial games out there with crappy and repetitive music. Graphics are the smoother version of anime-like RPG's in the early '90s.

Well...that's as far as the good stuff goes, other good features that may or may not exist aren't worth mentioning on my part.

The Bad
Well, I never got by the 2nd town in this game and I'll tell you why: poor planning. For some stupid reason the monsters in the game are incredibly difficult, I finally figured out that you had to level up your characters before running around on the mainland. Tough monsters isn't an issue if you have enough gold to rest up. Unfortunately, you don't. At least as far as I've played it, these monsters don't carry a purse with them. Which kinda misses the whole point of fighting monsters, since you can't buy equipment to make your characters stronger, and you can't buy potions or buy a room for the night to heal yourself.

To make thing's worse, the combat system is THE WORST OF ALL TIME. Developers, I hope your reading this! It probably isn't the worst, but it sure hell made my top 3 worst combat systems of all time list. There is not strategy whatsoever in combat here. It's technically just approaching the monster and press space bar. That itself isn't a problem. It's a problem if you walk pass the monster and you still get whacked even though you've passed the monster by miles. What the...? There goes the "hit and run tactic" since there isn't any, thus eliminating any possibility of strategy. Just press space bar until you or the other sorry bloke dies. Ooooh....what vision they have!

Last but not least, the character inventory is quite irritating. Though the correct word is "inefficient". It takes 3-4 or more clicks to go where you want to go. First you have to choose which character, second you have to choose whether to see the inventory or equip an item, third you have to choose "which" kind of item you want to equip (e.g. head gear, armor, weapon), fourth (finally) you choose the item you want to equip. What in the hell happened to "go to inventory and equip?". Why in the hell does it have to take this much time just to equip a freakin' dagger? Egad. This is real proof that life is already complicated...and people make it worse (sigh).

The Bottom Line
Because of the lousy and irritating combat system itself, I wouldn't recommend it.