Darklands Review

Developed and published by MicroProse and released in 1992 on MS-DOS, Darklands is a computer role-playing game most notable for its 15th cent. Mythic-medieval German setting and open-ended gameworld.

In Darklands, the player controls a band of up to four heroes (a party of adventurers) in search of fame and fortune. To this end, the heroes explore the overworld to battle the mundane and the mythical in dungeons, the wilderness and urban environments.

The main problems with Darklands are its menu-driven exploration, pause for orders combat system (RTwP) and primitive graphics, control systems and interface presentation.

Another big problem was that Darklands was coded to run in just 640 KB of RAM (581 KB main, 176 KB EMS) yet took up a monstrous 20 MB of hard disk space. But in 1988 even most Amiga 500s were equipped with 1 MB of RAM, and the 80286 could address up to 16 MB. All half-serious PC gamers owned 386 DX33s with at least 2 MB RAM in 1992. I mean, come on!

Like most MS-DOS cRPGs of the 90s, Darklands runs like my Aunt May after she's had too much sherry to drink. 8 bit Commodore 64 games from the 80s run better. And while the game is rich in stats, build potentiality and itemization, there isn't much in the gameworld that is reactive to such.

Coding in stat-bloat is easy. Making the stats do something meaningful, not so easy.

As regards Darklands chargen, abbreviated stats are barely readable or interpretable without reference to the game manual (which was written for arm-chair historians):

A nice aspect of Darklands chargen is that we can see in realtime how our stats are being impacted on the right as we mouse-over backgrounds and occupations on the left.

Darklands' in-town exploration is menu-driven; that is, the player selects where to go and what to do from a list of options presented as text. Note how you can barely read the font even when the screencaps have been doubled in size. Note also how the blue highlight is harder to read than non-highlighted text.

The UI is laggy, non-tactile, it flickers when modes are changed, and the inventories are list-based. Some may argue that decent UIs and clarity in early 90s stat presentation were not possible due to low screen resolutions, but Master of Magic would prove them wrong. Master of Magic also featured in-game stat explanations through its Expanding Help system. Pre-MoM games did as well.

Couple the overall clunkiness of Darklands with its kludgy RTwP combat system on barely-scrolling battlescapes (which should have been turn-based) -- how can it be recommended in 2024?

Get on my level:

cf. The History of 1990s Computer Games.