Fighting Fantasy Classics: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain

The Good
All the original artwork is there, the text has been tweaked I think. Russ Nicholson's black/white illustrations were a big part of the book's dungeon atmosphere, but I'm sure all the book's illustrations would've been in colour had the copying costs been affordable. So with this electronic version of the book, I feel I'm seeing it as Steve, Ian and Russ wished we could.

I like that the adventurer you play in this game is not necessarily good or evil, neither is Zagor the Warlock. It's more, you want to take on a great challenge, navigate Firetop Mountain, defeat Zagor and claim his treasure and Zagor is like a dungeonmaster who also enjoys the challenge, putting obstacles in adventurers' paths, challenging them to find the correct keys to his treasure chest and new weaponry.

The Bad
So the dungeon has many keys spread through it, but only three of them are any good. You have to follow a rather narrow path to get all the right keys, which can make a lot of the other paths feel redundant, despite the work that went into writing and illustrating them. I suppose the idea is that you take the false paths on your first attempts and after a number of failures, find the correct one, but once you know the correct one, much of the book seems useless. So I think there should be multiple valid key combinations for the treasure chest at the end.

The Bottom Line
It's an improvement on the book (the first of the series, published in 1982), which was one of the best of the series (of about 65 books I think). I admit it can get boring, but it's something good to come back to.