Dragon's Lair 3D: Return to the Lair

The Good
The story is simple enough. Daphne was kidnapped by the dragon Singe. Now incompetent but loyal Dirk the Daring will risk life and limb in a trap-filled castle to rescue her.

Dragon's Lair 3D- Return To The Lair isn't so much a sequel to the previous Dragon's Lair games as it is a remake.

The original was immensely popular in its' time, but really it was only because the game was so beautiful. Actual play wasn't much more than hitting the right joystick combo at EXACTLY the right instant.

This new game improves on the original greatly by remaking the castle in full 3D. You have the option to have a free floating camera controlled by the mouse ala MDK or Rune or a 'Console Camera' where the game controls the camera movement. I never use the console camera, but it's nice to be given a choice.

The timed puzzles are (for the most part) gone and you can move about freely and do what you want.

Dirk is pretty nimble. He can run, roll, climb, etc. He can also pick up objects and weapons so he doesn't always have to rely on his sword. Overall, I'd say the game play is similar to Eidos' Deathrap Dungeon.

All of the characters and several of the objects are cel-shaded to keep the original Dragon's Lair 'look' and it works beautifully.

The sound effects work. They aren't fantastic, but most are lifted from the original, so I can't rightly label this as bad.

The Bad
My one major complaint is the lack of skill settings. There is no easy/hard choice at the beginning of the game and overall the game is just too easy. You hit a Giddy Goon with your sword once and he stands there dazed while you take him out with chop number two.

In a room where several armored bad guys teleport in and rush you, you can tell that this should be an adrenaline filled moment, but the knights are bested so easily that the overall effect is boredom.

While the sound effects go from being great to just serviceable, I do HATE Daphne's breathy-but annoying voice. In the original game, her husky voice came off as comically sexy because she only spoke a few lines. Unfortunately, in Dragon's Lair 3D, you have an amulet that communicates with her constantly. Let me tell you, her voice gets pretty irritating pretty quick.

She also gives you hints, but it would have worked better if the game allowed you to access the amulet to request a hint. Or maybe a chime could let you know hints are available for the area you're in. As it is, Daphne sometimes spells out exactly what you have to do to move on, destroying any small semblance of adventure or puzzle solving that might have been present.

There are a few rooms that are exact recreations of rooms from the original (the burning rope swing and the knight with the electrified floor for example) and at these times the game will take away the free floating camera in favor of a stationary camera to make the game feel like the original. This wasn't terrible, but it did get me killed a few times.

One last little niggle is that while the characters are all cel-shaded and beautiful, the rest of the graphics are just standard polygon fare. I personally would have liked to see every wall/floor/object cel-shaded. The only time this is really a bad thing is when a statue comes to life. First, he's just an object in the room. Then when he starts to move, he's suddenly cel-shaded, with no real transition in between. It's pretty distracting.

The Bottom Line
I see my cons are longer than my pros, but overall I like this game. If you remember blowing all your money on the coin-op version, you owe it to yourself to pick this up. The nostalgia factor is pretty high.

For other, younger gamers, the game is pretty and it's not a bad third-person dungeon-crawl, but there are lots of better ones available.

Bring on Space Ace 3D!