Reviewer: Cankerwurm

12/23/2012 02:40pm

If you loved the original Adventure from the 80's, this game is for you. Epic Adventure stays true to the Adventure format while providing some cool and unique twists that will keep you busy and challenged for a long time. This is more than just a simple hack or even a complete revamping. It's a whole new game with new enemies, graphics, and even gameplay mechanics. You play as the standard "square", on a mission to (once again) recover the lost chalice, stolen by the Evil Magician, while fighting Orcs, a Troll, and a giant Dragon.

Graphically, the game is superb. The mazes are now completely asymmetrical, and some even have cool-looking flashing walls. The enemies are large and intimidating, and new areas include a skull cave and Dragon's castle, which gives a salute to the original game (a giant "duck-dragon" statue in the center). Controls are nice and fluid, with your "square" hero moving at a slightly faster pace (except in the presence of the Palantir - nice little salute to LOTR). Also, when you pick up items, they stay in a fixed spot on your character (i.e. the sword and staff will always stay on your left or right, the key and chalice will always be above you, etc.), which saves you constantly "repositioning" items around you so you can use them properly.

And then we have the difficulty. Oh Lord, the difficulty.

As in the first Adventure, there are 3 levels, accessible by pressing the Select button. Level 1 is the short game with items in fixed locations, Level 2 is the long game with items in fixed locations, and Level 3 is the long game with items in random locations. Levels 2 and 3 not only have more enemies, some of whom take more hits to kill, but also the Magician's hawk, who is hands down the most ANNOYING character in the game (or in any game, for that matter). Remember the bat from the original? At least you could catch it and thus prevent it from stealing from you, if only temporarily. The hawk, however, not only can easily outrun you and take whatever well-needed item you're carrying, but can also pick YOU up and drop you anywhere it wants, including within surrounding walls, or right next to immediate danger. A real issue I find here is that once you find the sword or the staff, the hawk just snatches it and flies off, leaving it somewhere on the outer edges of the map, and considering that you then have to work your way towards it through Orcs, the Troll, and the Dragon with no means of defense (not even knowing if you're heading in the right direction), you often find yourself in a sort of stalemate situation, and your best bet here is then just to turn the game off and on and restart. And even if you do manage to find it, the hawk just steals it again and it's back to square one. If you're a chronic controller-smasher, this could get expensive.

A couple other things I noticed: the manual says that the staff can be used to defeat the Orcs, but in my experience, the fireballs just fly right through them. Secondly, you can't "shimmy" along the walls like you could in the first game. When you're being pursued by something, you can get stuck for a second, which more often than not proves fatal. It may be a while before you even get to see the Magician or Chalice (both of which only appear after the Dragon has been slain), let alone get a chance to defeat him and take it.

And finally, when you do manage to beat the game, you'll discover that it's not necessarily as rewarding an experience as you might have thought, because a high percentage of your victory was just plain luck. There is virtually nothing you can do but hope that the hawk just leaves you alone (well, the manual says you can shoot him with the staff, but good luck with that).

Level 1, on the other hand, is almost insultingly easy.

So in the end, it's a great and highly recommended game, and a worthy successor to the original, but the unbalanced difficulty may be a turnoff for some. Regardless, it's a nice addition to your collection, and buying it will encourage Byte Knight to make more. Myself, I can hardly wait for "The Evil Magician Returns II."