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