Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos (DOS)

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Description

The Dark Army is on the move again, led by the evil sorceress Scotia. Her goal is obvious: to destroy Gladstone Keep and its ruler King Richard. Scotia herself has recently become more powerful after acquiring "the Mask" from the Urban Mines, gaining the ability to shape-shift. She is virtually unstoppable and able to infiltrate Gladstone Keep, poisoning King Richard. If it were not for the intervention of Sorceress Dawn, the monarch would surely be dead. In order to find a cure for the King's illness, a band of heroes must set out on an adventure, and keep themselves alive from the Dark Army forces.

Lands of Lore: Throne of Chaos is a real-time dungeon-crawling role-playing game viewed from a first-person perspective. Players begin by choosing one of the four available protagonists: the Dracoid Ak'shel (high magic power), the Huline Kieran (high speed), and two humans: Michael (high strength) and Conrad (balanced character). Each has his weaknesses and strengths, but all abilities in the game can be eventually upgraded.

Much of the game consists of exploring pseudo-3D maze-like dungeons. Most of them contain secret areas and it is sometimes necessary to solve puzzles to advance. Real-time combat involves clicking on either the attack or magic icon for each character. Depending on their speed attribute they will need a certain amount of cooldown time before the player can activate them again. The point-and-click interface allows interaction with some background objects, sometimes eliciting comments from the protagonist or his companions.

The game does not feature manual character development, introducing instead a semi-automatic form of leveling up, where skills of the hero and the companions are divided into Fighting, Magic and Rogue skills. Each skill level will increase when killing enemies using a particular type of attack: melee weapons increase the Fighting skills, magic increases the Magic skill, and ranged weapons increase the Rogue skills. In the course of the game players will form a party of up to three heroes in the quest for the cure. The player is able to equip these characters with new weapons and armor in a "paper doll" styled interface. The CD version includes full speech.

Screenshots

Promo Images

Alternate Titles

• "黑暗王座" -- Traditional Chinese spelling
• "Lands of Lore: Kaosu no Gyokuza" -- Japanese manual title
• "Lands of Lore: Chaos Na Tronie" -- Polish title
• "ランズオブロア" -- Japanese spelling

Part of the Following Groups

• Fantasy Creatures: Orcs
• Gameplay feature: Auto-mapping
• Gameplay feature: Character development - Repetition
• Games with manual lookup copy protection
• Genre: Dungeon Crawler
• Lands of Lore series
• Sound engine: AIL/Miles Sound System
• White Label releases

User Reviews

A wonderful and magically innocent combination of fantasy and fairy-tale	worldwideweird (54)
Finally, on their own grounds	MAT (235304)
A very well designed RPG that lacks proper atmosphere and gameplay rules	Optimus (83)
Fun adventure, the best of the series	Thohan (19)	unrated
A fascinating Eye of the Beholder-style game.	^LutheR^ (123)
I wish my sound would work on my old PC so I could play it again	Cyric (50)	unrated
An excellent Dungeon Master style game, that actually has very few dungeons.	Chris Martin (1204)
An adventuress, spine tingling game with many creatures and puzzles.	Jess Private (2)

Critic Reviews

Secret Service / New S Service	Oct, 1993	100 out of 100	100
Pixel-Heroes.de	Jun 06, 2011	10 out of 10	100
The Retro Spirit	Dec 22, 2009	5.5 out of 6	92
ASM (Aktueller Software Markt)	Aug, 1993	11 out of 12	92
Joystick (French)	Mar, 1994	91 out of 100	91
PC Games (Germany)	Mar, 1994	88 out of 100	88
Computer and Video Games (CVG)	Oct, 1993	83 out of 100	83
ASM (Aktueller Software Markt)	May, 1994	10 out of 12	83
Just Adventure	1998	B	75
Legendra	Apr 25, 2010		70

Forums

Topic	# Posts	Last Post
win 3.x?	4	Terok Nor (34292) Feb 13, 2015
MIDI music with Soundblaster effects?	6	Slug Camargo (589) Dec 06, 2010
Unicorn statue	5	vedder (63219) Dec 01, 2010

Trivia

Versions

Both a floppy disk and a CD-ROM version were released where only the latter features voice-acting. The CD-ROM version also contains "Lore of the Lands" - an extra feature that introduces the player to the legend of Lands of Lore, presented with black and white pictures narrated by King Richard (voice-over by Patrick Stewart).

Awards

• Computer Gaming World
  • June 1994 (Issue #119) – Best Male Voice-Over Acting (for Patrick Stewart for his role as King Richard)
• GameStar (Germany)
  • Issue 12/1999 - #68 in the "100 Most Important PC Games of the Nineties" ranking

Related Web Sites

• Hints for Lands of Lore 1 (These hints, written by Jason Strautman, will get you through the game without cheating as much.)
• Walkthrough for Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos (posted on GameFaqs.com)
• Wikipedia Entry (Information on Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos in the free online encyclopedia: Wikipedia.)