Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon

The Good
Eye of the Beholder II is one of the classic CRPGs that set the standards for years to come. I have been trying to complete this game for over ten years now - ever since I first played it, and without success... until today. This goes to prove two things: the first is that EOB2 is an incredibly good game, and the second is that EOB2 is an incredibly tough game to beat.

So what's so good about it? The first thing that comes to mind is the brilliant graphics. Between the great 2D drawings that are so very typical of Westwood (as is clearly evident in The Legend of Kyrandia, for instance) and the very detailed psuedo-3D engine, the game really looks gorgeous; not having real freedom of movement - remember this game came out a full year before what I believe is the first realtime raycasted shooter, Catacomb Abyss - means that the artists had much more freedom than usual creating very detailed textures and sprites.

The interface is great - it is easy to learn and easy to manage. It is not perfect - some things could have been done better, for example the ability to see the compass and cast a spell at the same time, or being able to see character statistics at the same time as changing items (so one can see the immediate influence of the items), but despite these shortcomings the interface is extremely well designed and makes even intense battles easy to manage.

The music in the PC version is not as good as the Amiga version (despite having more sound channels) for obvious reasons, but it is still terrific, having being made by Frank Klepacki (later to make the music for both Dune 2 and Kyrandia).

The story is not particularly deep, but is very characteristic of the D&D or AD&D adventures that were commonly sold when these gaming systems were prevalent.

Finally, gameplay is extremely long (even someone deeply familiar with the game will probably need a few days to finish it), the environments are varied and the game is very satisfying over all.

The Bad
Like I said before, Eye of the Beholder II is incredibly difficult - occasionally ridiculously so. Some battles require dozens of reloads, and on occasion I just couldn't figure out a puzzle and had to use a walkthrough (I wish I could say this happened only once...). Kudos to anyone who's managed to finish the game without any outside help.

The Bottom Line
An incredible game, worthy of the title "An Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition computer product".