Quest for Glory I: So You Want To Be A Hero

The Good
The last of the remakes Sierra produced, Quest for Glory is an adventure/RPG hybrid made by the same people that brought us the original game. An unnamed hero enters the town of Spielburg overrun by brigands, and discovers a curse placed on the Baron's daughter by the witch Baba Yaga. And it is up to the hero to find someway to break the curse, even if it takes him days to do so.

I already covered the game mechanics in my review of the original, so I won't go into detail into those here. What I didn't say in that review is that each of the classes offer different solutions to puzzles, but all of them require a certain trait to be built up. For instance, you are supposed to climb a tree so you can collect the Healer's ring from a bird nest. If you try to climb up the tree, you will fail. If you do it often enough, you will be able to climb up in the end.

Being a remake, the game benefits from running on Sierra's newer SCI engine. You direct the character through a point-and-click interface, rather than typing commands. There are actually two icon interfaces. The main one is found by pointing the cursor to the top of the screen, and if you played other Sierra games, you know what that looks like. The secondary icon interface can be found by clicking an icon in the main one, and it is there you can make your character walk, run, sneak, choose to rest for a period of time, or check your statistics out. Both icon interfaces are well designed and I could easily tell what each one does just by looking at the pictures on them.

The hand-painted backgrounds are wonderful, and the animation of each of the characters is smooth. The character portraits were done with clay models, but I didn't like some of them. Baba Yaga looks like the Joker's wife. I love the monster fights. The monsters themselves are drawn and animated nicely. I almost felt sorry for having to kill them.

I enjoyed listening to the game's soundtracks, especially when you go into combat mode. The soundtrack itself blends in with what you are doing. Now, I know I said this in my original QFG reviews as well as my others, but I'll say it again: If you happen to have a Roland MT-32 sound module, you get to hear the soundtrack with real instruments rather than MIDI.

As I said earlier, the game offers different solutions to most of the puzzles, depending on what class you have selected, so it's well worth replaying the game again and taking a different approach. I have the strategy guide, which contains a brief walkthrough and there are specific instructions for each of the classes. There is enough interesting information that already made me play the game at some point.

The Bad
In the original version, when you were in combat mode, you could still type commands in that allowed you to escape or to cast spells at the monsters, among other actions. The remake has none of this. In the remake, however, it has been replaced by eight icons, four which are hidden from you unless you click on the big shield in the middle. I still can't get used to this system, and found out typing commands are much easier for me. Also, when you try to escape, the monster which you are escaping from reappears right next to you, making it hard to run to the next screen. This becomes so annoying if you are escaping because you don't have the health/stamina to kill them. For this reason, you are forced to restore a game and then try again.

Not a lot of effort was put into the ending. It is even worse than the one from the VGA remake of Police Quest. There is no background music, and there is only one closing scene, then there are the credit.

The Bottom Line
If you haven't played the original Quest for Glory, you're not missing out on much. The remake boasts wonderful graphics and a soundtrack. The point-and-click interface may have replaced the text parser, but that's Sierra remakes for you. Any QFG fan should at least try the remake to see whether they like it or not. For me, it's just the new combat system that I found tedious.