Kevin Garzo @francotau

Veil of Darkness (DOS)

Solid Dracula Adventure game that is mislabeled as an RPG

The Good
The graphics are good for their time. Anyone who has played any DOS or SNES era games will enjoy the visuals.

The story is the typical hero ends up in Transylvania and has to kill Dracula. It's cliche but it's written well enough to motivate you to keep going.

The puzzles are solid and make sense in context of the game. There aren't many silly contrived puzzles you see in many Adventure game.

The big positive for me was the open ended nature of the game. You can skip around in what order you want to travel or solve quests/puzzles. Too often, adventures games are written well but force you along a linear path.

The Bad
Combat is overly simplified. You literally just walk up to a monster and click attack over and over until one of you is dead. Most of the time you end up just running away monsters so you don't have to keep going back to town to heal. That being said, fighting and/or running away from enemies probably takes up 10-20% of the game.

Inventory management becomes more and more of a chore. The interface itself is a nice. But you can only hold maybe 15 items in your backpack. But within your backpack you can have a bag that holds 12 items in it. So halfway through the game you end up having a bunch of a bags of items inside your bag. It's hard to explain, but anyone who has played Ultima 7 will know what I'm talking about.

The music is pretty bad even for MIDI. There are certain locations like the starting town where this really grating music loops over and over.

The Bottom Line
Veil of Darkness is a solid Adventure/RPG hybrid game that plays very much like the Quest for Glory series. The game is mostly about interacting with NPCs and solving puzzles with your inventory.

By Kevin Garzo on June 28, 2009

Prophecy of the Shadow (DOS)

Nice presentation, boring story and combat

The Good
This game has very nice VGA graphics. It also might have the first use of live action digitized "video". The interface is solid for the DOS era. That's about all the good things that I can say about it.

The Bad
The story is the standard kill the foozle. The NPCs are interchangeable and repetitive. So the writing isn't going to draw you in.

The combat is neither fun nor strategic. Combat is real time where you just keep mashing the attack button over and over till they're dead. You can use ranged weapons but it's not really any fun either. Their aren't many puzzles, and the ones that are there are too simple.

The character development is pretty simple too for an RPG.

The Bottom Line
It's a single character, real time combat RPG. Think Zelda without the fun combat, good puzzles and charm. Or Diablo without the satisfying character development and treasure hunting. It's not necessarily a bad game. It's just meant to be a beginner level RPG but it ends up being extremely boring.

By Kevin Garzo on June 23, 2009