dmarusz's Full Review: Return to Krondor for Windows
The Betrayal duo of "Betrayal at Krondor" and "Betrayal in Antarra" has a warm place in my heart. Both games were to me what PC playing is all about. There was no real hoopla about them. Even at the time, both weren't well-polished, super action games. Instead they offered a great story mixed with a fun, pull-you-in style of gameplay. So, even though I didn't hear anything great about Return to Krondor (RTK), I finally gave in and bought it (sadly in 2005, how slow am I?) Is it the great third installment I was looking for? Definitely not.
The first thing that I noticed when I started playing was that they changed the format. In the previous two games, they put you into first person in semi-real time as you traveled. You would from this format only in battle. Once fighting, you would convert to a third person and move in a turn-based style combat. This was usually good because you had a party and needed the third person view to control the attack.
In RTK, Sierra went with almost a full three dimensional environment, filled with multiple cameras and full moving characters. This sounds like a great idea and no big deal for a nowadays game, but back then, not many companies had great success. In this case, it bogged down the game. And also, with most 3-D games, what you get in perspective filled, full dimensional space you have to give up on detail. A low polygon model and poor backgrounds replace possibly a full cinematic view that you could paste in. In the Betrayal duo, the real time movement was 3-D in spirit, but was really, 2-D billboards constructed in a 3-D environment, thus not using up needed graphics card memory. (again, a serious issue on those old 4MB cards.)
Moreover, the camera views could be very problematic. Getting stuck behind something or not seeing what you needed to with a camera was frustrating. This combined with the stiff animations gave way to a solid finishing argument against the move to full 3-D.
All in all, the game, I guess, tried to branch out past the old standards. However, their reach was farther than their grasp. This should be a lesson to all. Change, even though they say it is, is not always good. Look at all of the great past games that had subpar sequels. A further example of this poor "grasp" was the lock picking procedure. They changed what they did with the duo, going instead with this real-time contraption of disarming locks. The rules didn't make sense when you first began, and then poison and flame often filled your lungs. Nice. Then, when you did get a hang of it, the picking was not refined enough so that when you click the mouse, you activate the stop at the same time. (The system consisted of a swinging pendulum which you basically had to stop at its lowest point. When you clicked near the lowest point, it didn't register to well into the upswing.) Something that was meant to be fun, was not.
Now was it all bad. Not really. It has some appeal that could sustain you through moments. I've griped a ton about the graphics but the scenery in the animation cut scenes was beautiful. I wondered where those artists took off to in the rest of the game.
The voice acting was nearly terrific. Generally, in the past, these games have been fairly good, but in this case, they one-upped the duo. Of course, this may have been the only place.
What was in line with the duo was the nice way of character growth. You could spread your experience points in a wide variety of ways, and they gave you plenty of them when you leveled. So, you could tweak your character the way you wanted, but you could also make a mistake or two and not be a total wash out. (It can get a little discouraging if you can't make it all the up the path of fire magic if you accidentally put too many points into dexterity.) They had a nice way of ramping the use of points as well. You could get a rudimentary use/skill of anything, but to be a master you had to pay a higher price.
Now that we got the good stuff out of the way, let's finally put this guy to death. Let's talk about the strategy of fighting. Not much. They use a turn based method that soon gets repetitive and down right boring. Worse yet, the programmers set the action at low speed which resets to that position every time that you loaded the game. In another words, if you load up a game and forget to move the slider bar on combat speed to high, you will find yourself cursing. There's few things worse than watching you and you enemies meander towards each other in turn based movement. It's like watching two grandpas slugging it out ... with worse coordination. "Look, Grandpa took 30 points of damage when his opponent nearly brushed his spear by grandpa's hair."
Ah, and so it concludes, the game is a real let down to the series. Maybe they knew it was the last in the series and they wanted let he people down easy because they weren't making another sequel. Or, maybe they're sick individuals who wanted to see me cry. Either way, this was a lackluster performance with a few small shiny spots.
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