Dark Ages

The Good
In 1991, it had designer attributes and was one of the best games out there. I thought it was fun (I was 6).

The Bad
Well, it was good in '91, but, let's face it, that was many years ago and games have changed since then.

The Bottom Line
Just a typical side scroller where you kill enemies and go to the next level.

The Good
As a child, the Prince grew up watching an evil warlord named Garth murder his father - the King - and banish him to a faraway land to be raised by peasants, never giving him the opportunity to exact revenge or prevent Garth from bringing undead creatures back to life. Unfortunately for Garth, the peasant he chose to raise the Prince was once the kingdom's greatest hero, and throughout his childhood, he was trained to become a champion of justice. You were soon let go so you can free the kingdom from the dark ages of Garth.

Dark Ages is a horizontally-scrolling game with a fantasy setting, split into three volumes. In the first volume, you have to go up to wise men and press the Up arrow key to find out what they want. You then proceed through the level, collect that item, and run back to him. Doing this will cause a cave to open up, allowing you to proceed down into the next level. In volumes two and three, this becomes irrelevant as basically you’re making your way to the other side of the screen.

You are assigned eight health units, and one is lost if you touch various creatures. Some of them include birds, spiders, and a claw that comes up from under the ground and tries to crush you. Lose all your health units, and you have to restart the level. Luckily for the Prince, gold coins are scattered throughout the levels; if you get eight of these (five if you activate the cheat mode), one unit is installed. Occasionally, you can get a beating heart, restoring your health to maximum.

To defeat these creatures, you are equipped with an energy bolt. How much strength it has depends on the number of green gems in your inventory. You start with one gem, so you can only throw one energy bolt at a time. Collect two gems and you will fire two bolts, and so on. The maximum number of gems you can have is four. You can also find masks throughout some levels, and these change your weapon. The only other weapon I managed to find is the boomerang, which I found more effective than the bolts.

Dark Ages is the first Apogee game to feature an Adlib soundtrack, and it goes in a specific order. The tracks are not boring and are a joy to listen to. The control scheme can be configured before the game starts. You only need to use a few keys, with the default being the arrows to move, [CTRL] to jump, and [ALT] to fire. These key combinations are used throughout every Apogee platform game to date, making their games easy to play.

The Bad
Out of all the games made by Apogee, this one is awful when it comes to graphics. The major one has to be the animation of the Prince; when he walks, he looks like a charging bull. Also, when you let one of the birds fly off the screen and wait a few seconds, you still see a portion of it when you are going back the way you came. I don’t understand why one patch of grass is animated while another patch is not, or why the developers didn’t put so much effort into the backdrops. If the game was set in ancient Greece, this would have made sense.

You will meet Garth in all three volumes, but all he does is stand there and not put up much of a fight. In the final level of the third volume, you can get a powerful laser beam, that will help do greater damage to him, but I question why this very weapon isn’t available throughout your quest.

The Bottom Line
Dark Ages is an okay game, but it is not the best Apogee made. The graphics are dull, and some of the animations are questionable. However, it was the first game by Apogee to feature an AdLib soundtrack. Even though some of the tracks repeat in each volume, I think they are brilliantly composed. The game is rare, even GOG hasn't heard of it.

The Good
Nothing really - I just got it and finished it just to have another finished game in my repertoire. Decent controls, if nothing else.

The Bad
Crappy, truly crappy graphics, horrible sound effects and music (can't remember if there even was any), badly slow engine (with terrible bugs), completely unclever level design and the game is just so easy, took me less than an hour to complete.

The Bottom Line
A really terrible platform game. Give yourself a break and stay away from it.