Advanced Dungeons and Dragons: Heroes of the Lance

To be fair, it’s clear that Heroes of the Lance has more going on than we actually used. There are scrolls, there are potions, bows, offensive spells, a Blue Crystal Staff that you apparently should be a lot more careful with than we were, and presumably those gems and pouches and other assorted dungeon bric-a-brac would have come in handy for something.

On the other hand, according to the walkthrough, we got though about a third of the game in 40 minutes, including about 15 minutes of repetitive massacres because we couldn’t figure out how to switch the lead character. So I’m not sure when we would learned how to use all of that stuff, or suddenly needed to know it, especially when our battle strategy of B button mashing seemed to work great. Oh, wait, except when you’re fighting the naked midget guy - then you need to point down while you mash B. Because, you know, he’s short.

And honestly, when I have to go through about nine steps just to pick something up, I’m not really inspired to figure out what else might be lurking in the menu systems with just another 20 choices.

Another thing: this is one of those early RPGs where they expect you to think its fun to map out the dungeon on graph paper. Except they mix it up a little by constantly changing the direction you’re facing. Go north through a door, end up facing west with the door to your east. It was an exercise in N-dimensional space, really, which stretches the limits of the map-makers art. Should you have trouble, you’re welcome to use mine:



Granted, I don’t have the keenest sense of direction around, but my maps are typically a little easier to follow than this. But then they don’t typically require a notation for the wormhole-to-the-place-you-just-were that Heroes of the Lance is so fond of.

In short: it wasn’t good.

Ratings:
As an exercise in fitting the most items into the least game: 4
As a thought experiment in N-dimensional space: 5
As an actual game: 2