Darklands Review

 Darklands, a game released first in 1992 by Microprose on floppy disk, then again in 1995 on CD-ROM, was the first and only RPG ever created by Microprose, although it wouldn’t be the last RPG they ever published, but the other RPG or so that they (might) have released is another story entirely, thankfully.

Darklands sees the player creating a party of up to four adventurers who seek to do good and avoid evil and bring everlasting honor to their names. Whether they succeed in that goal, or rather, how far they get in completing that goal, is completely up to the player.

Unlike most RPGs, Darklands doesn’t use the whole ‘select player character class, gender, etc.’ and instead makes the player choose their family background, which skills they’re best at, etc.

Your party starts off in the inn of a randomly selected city in the game world, where they’ll discuss the plans they came up with, and after that, you are, quite literally, allowed to GO ANYWHERE AND DO ANYTHING, although as a fresh party just starting out, you should stay within the confines of the city you start in and travel the streets of the city at night, so that you can build your characters’ skill levels with weaponry up. You can also get some loot and money for your troubles, not to mention that you get local rep randomly after the battle, which has it’s own rewards, such as lower prices for staying at the inn, cheaper costs at the equipment stores in that particular city, easier time enterting the city after you leave, etc.

Speaking of leaving the city, whether you buy this game legally or you pirate it, there’s one problem that you’re going to have to deal with, and that’s the copy protection. Unfortunately, I couldn't take a screenshot of that, but it's something that needs to be removed. Completely.

Assuming you don’t have the copy protection, then you are quite literally out of luck, as entering the incorrect copy protection symbol here gets you booted back to DOS, and if you haven’t saved in a while... oh, boy. Here’s the interesting thing about the copy protection, though: if you’re a student of mideval alchemy symbols, then you won’t need the copy protection codes, after all, because the game’s copy protection is literally alchemy symbols from mideval times!

Anyways, after you’ve grinded your party’s skills in weaponry a bit, you can head out into the wide world of Darklands, which is 15th century Germany, which is in the Holy Roman Empire, which, at the time, had a load of other countries that would eventually become independent nations of their own, or whatever. You know what I mean. Out in the overworld, you can run into all sorts of random events, some good, some bad. This is one of the best things about Darklands, as when you combine it with the random starting location at every new game and with each encounter the player comes across having multiple solutions to each of them means a TON of replay value, especially since they are all based on either one or ALL of the party’s skill levels in some way or form, and they are ALL illustrated with beautifully drawn pictures that give the player a sort of visual indicator of what one should expect from the situation.

The music in Darklands really does evoke the feeling of traveling through mideval Germany and the surrounding environs, as it gives a sense that the world of Germany, or at least, Germany as it was back then, was a beautiful place to be, but you have to be alert and vigilant, because at any time, your party could be ambushed and get one or more of your characters killed, and once one of your characters have died, then that’s it. That’s all she wrote. If a character should “buy the farm” as it were, then that character is gone, and unless it was in a battle that YOU, the player, won, then NOT ONLY is all the time and effort you wasted on that character gone forever, but so are the items they were carrying, and considering that once you lose a battle, you lose all of your items anyway, it literally doubles your punishment for losing, but hey, at least you can save anywhere, at anytime, long before Nintendo hijacked the phrase and most likely trademarked it, but oh well.

It isn’t just the usual bandits and robber knights (called Raubritter in-game, but I don’t know how to put the umlaut over the u, so just bear with me.) that the player will be put up against, either. You’ve also got to deal with giant spiders, a “wurm” (I forget the proper name), schrats, and even dragons!

Yes, you read that right, and that isn’t a fake screenshot you see, either! Long before random encounters with dragons in Skyrim was a thing, they were first potential random encounters in Darklands, although they won’t truly show up until near the end of the game’s main quest, so you won’t have to worry about venturing out too far early on and getting slaughtered by one by accident, or at least, I think you won’t. I could be wrong, though.

The main quest in this game is a joke. Seriously, it makes Nintendo games look like they have good plots, and that’s really saying something, too, at least by Mario and Pokemon standards. There is LITERALLY only three locations that you absolutely HAVE TO GO TO in order to beat the game. They are, in order, the High Sabbat, the Monastary and the Citadel (I actually forget the order of Monastary and Citadel and though I think I’m right here, I could very well be wrong.), and after you beat the game you get transported back to a random city with a 50 point boost to every city in the game, and any story related items that you might’ve been carrying with you will be taken from you so that you can’t just complete the main story again immediately to continually reap the benefits.

Now, considering all the praise and love that I’ve given this game so far, you’re probably wondering if it does anything wrong, I assume? Well, you’re right. There are at least three things I can think of that, if they had been changed or left out of the game entirely, it would’ve been so much better. 1.)The game should be sped up a considerable amount, at least for the battles, mostly because they’re so slow, and 2.) make it to where the game gives the player a bit more direction for the game’s main story, although I must admit that if you came to Darklands looking for character development or an engaging story, then you, my friend(s), are doing it wrong, because just like in Mario and Pokemon, you ain’t gonna find it here, ashamed though I am to admit that. 3.) The last thing is something that I mentioned earlier in the review, and that's the copy protection. It should be removed from a 20-something-year-old game.

I will state that Darklands ends with a boss battle... of sorts, not in the usual sense, but that you must make certain choices in the game that will determine the reward you get.

I just now realized that I forgot to go over the sidequests of Darklands. Really, there’s only about three, and of them, there’s really only one that I’ve found to be truly worthy of the player’s time, and that’s the slay the Raubritter one. The other two, get information from another city usually only gets you into trouble, and looking for a certain item that the ruler of any particular city might want is almost always so far away that it isn’t worth it, nevermind all the extra preparation that it takes, but all of this party is just my two cents. I’ll leave it up to you to decide which side quests are worthwhile and which ones aren’t. There’s also the Knocker (Dwarf) side quests in mines in random parts of Germany (have you noticed all the randomness in this game yet?) that usually end up costing one of the player’s characters more than it benefits the player himself, but that’s just how games were back then. However, you'll have to do these side quests in order to get help from a certain woman later on in the game. Heck, you could probably even beat the game without ever even meeting her!

Overall, I gotta be honest, I like this game just as much as I did when I first started playing a few years ago. It’s one of those games where I honestly wish that I would’ve been born a few years earlier just so that I could’ve played it when it was fresh and new so that I could’ve had an appreciation for it, kind of like the one I have for it now.

By the way, if this game sounds awesome to you--it is--you can buy it on either GOG.com or on Steam for just $5!

I honestly don’t know what else there is I can say about the game. I’ve told you everything I know about it, and the only thing left for me to say is, that I like Darklands a heckuva lot more than I did The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

This review is © 2019 Jestan Diams. Please don't repost this anywhere on the internet without my express written consent.