Eye of the Beholder

The Good
Eye of the Beholder provides a real-time, 3-D dungeon crawl that does a good job in creating a claustrophobic dungeon atmosphere.. The VGA graphics are good and the sound is adequate. There is a wide variety of monsters, treasure, and puzzles to find. I also enjoyed being able to increase the party size by resurrecting the bodies of adventurers found throughout the dungeon.

The Bad
While the graphics for the dungeon walls and the creatures are good, there is little additional graphical detail throughout environments. This causes all the rooms and hallways to look alike after a while. Early in the game, combat presents little challenge and consist mainly of clicking attack over and over. Later fights, however, have the potential to be more challenging. Unfortunately, due to the real-time nature of the combat, even these battles can become trivial affairs in which the player can avoid damage by sidestepping before opponent attacks. Using missile weapons can be a pain as each rock/arrow/dagger thrown has to be picked up again. I found myself ignoring the back row characters so that I wouldn’t have to pick up every arrow after each encounter. I also found identification of items to be difficul,t and without a hint book, I would likely never been able to identify anything.

The Bottom Line
EOB is moderately entertaining albeit with a few flaws. This game should appeal to those who enjoy hack and slash first person RPGs and don’t mind the step-by-step movement found within. The lack of an auto-map can be a plus or minus depending on the player’s love of graph paper. Overall, an adequate dungeon romp with lots of loot, lots of levels, and minimal story.