Dragon Wars

aka: The Bard's Tale IV
Moby ID: 2026

DOS version

A true classic CRPG I still enjoy playing

The Good
The graphics - Colourful EGA graphics with a nice 3D-view and large, animated monsters with a lot of personality.

The sound - Nice title tune and digitized sound effects, all through the beeper. (So none of that pathetic AdLib stuff they used to have back then.)

The gameplay - I just can't help but long for the days when moving from one side of the city to another in a CRPG took but a few seconds (what with block-by-block movement, controlled with the cursor keys), instead of clicking and waiting and clicking and waiting as per Baldur's Gate or Fallout (...and clicking and waiting...). I also prefer turn-based CRPG's to "real-time" ones.

The automap - 'Nuff said.

The Bad
The graphics - So the monster close-ups look good, but I wouldn't have minded if you could see the monsters/NPCs from afar. (As it is, most NPC's don't have pictures at all.) Also, the monsters don't react in any way to getting their teeth kicked in - they just loop the same fancy animations.

The plot - It's a good plot as far as it goes, but there really isn't much of it. Basically you just wander around until you're strong enough to kill the bad guy. It does have some puzzles, though, and what storyline there exists is well written.

The combat - Doesn't allow for much tactics, but that was the standard back then.

The Bottom Line
I believe this was my first (legal copy of an) IBM PC game, and I really got disoriented when playing it for the first time, as it was also the first first-person game I had ever played (the same thing happened to me when I played Doom for the first time). I was instantly hooked, however, as the graphics were just as good as in C=64 games (compared to Alleykat), and the game seemed really huge.

The game may not seem huge by todays standards, and it really isn't all that difficult, either, but it took me two computers two years to finish it, and I had a lot of fun with it. It is a fun and rewarding CRPG of its time, made by high standards, and I'd probably still play it if my 400MHz AMD would run it (I guess IBM PC-compatibles aren't all that compatible any longer).

by Late (77) on March 31, 2001

Back to Reviews