Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos was an important influence in my life. One of the best computer games I ever played, it was basically just a game where the player controlled a character who went through lots of environments looking for Scotia, the evil shapeshifting witch, in the hopes of killing her. It took me and my sister working together about three years to complete it, and that was only because we used a walkthrough. It was, therefore, pretty tricky, but only for inexperienced gamers like us. It was probably a doddle for those with a few more games under their hats, but seeing as Lizzie and I had previously only played games on the BBC called Scarecrow - which was basically Hangman with very simple words - and the Magic Telephone - which when played emitted a high pitched beeping sound and caused the BBC to crash, permanently - well, Lands of Lore was very difficult.
In the Introduction, King Richard of Gladstone discovers that Scotia has found the Nether Mask, which will allow her to change shape. He knows that she will attack Gladstone first. I haven't got the slightest idea why he's actually bothered, because Gladstone consists merely of a castle and nothing else. The only people he seems to rule over are a magician called Dawn, a very annoying bureaucrat called Geron, a paranoid herbalist called Nathaniel and an intensely insane blacksmith named Victor. Oh, and a load of guards who will attack you instantly if you so much as throw a shirt at them. Anyway, I've made my point. The game doesn't show that Gladstone is anything more than a castle. It takes Lands of Lore III to add to the area that Richard rules.
Anyway, in the next scene of the Introduction, we see Scotia finding the Nether Mask. Now this is quite odd, since in the previous scene, we saw Richard being told she had found it, so quite clearly the Introduction is not arranged in any sort of chronological order. Never mind, that's a minor niggle. Then Scotia demonstrates to the player that she can shapeshift - starting off as an old crone, she mutates into a beautiful woman (at least, that's what I assume she's supposed to look like, the graphics are not overly good) and then into a crow, then back into the old crone form again. Then she goes in for a spot of overacting, crying "Beware, King Richard! Ha ha ha ha haaaa!" in a manner reminiscent of Skeletor on He Man.
Then King Richard has to choose a champion from one of the four presented to him. The one chosen will be the one controlled by the player throughout the game. The candidates are Ak'Shel, Michael, Kieran and Conrad. Ak'Shel looked distinctly odd, with a quite disfigured face, but then he did have a tail as well, so I'm assuming he wasn't even supposed to be human. He was the one we always used, because he was really good at casting spells. Michael was a human who was really good at fighting. Kieran was a cat who was rubbish at fighting and magic, but claimed to be good at moving fast. This wasn't really a benefit, because you could only move as fast as you could manipulate the mouse, so Kieran was pretty much out of the running. Conrad was a human who was okay at everything, but we always wanted a character who could specialise in something, so we never picked him either.
I'm now going to give a brief summary of the game's plot, then get on to the review. The player has to find their way to King Richard's throneroom, where they are told to go and retrieve the Ruby of Truth from Roland's Manor in the Southlands. On returning without the Ruby, which has been stolen by a bunch of Scotia's Orcs, the player finds that King Richard has been poisoned by Scotia, and is then sent off with a new friend, Bacatta, to find the Draracle who might be able to cure King Richard. When you find the Draracle, he gives you a scroll with a riddle on it which, when deciphered, will offer the cure. When you get back to Gladstone, you find that it has been invaded by Scotia's Dark Army. You sail across a lake to Opinwood, where you find your way to the Gorkha Swamp. The Gorkha have recovered the Ruby of Truth from the Orcs, and give it to you. They also help to decipher the Riddle Scroll for you. You then go to the Urbish Mines, and, after much messing about, finally get another member of your party, Paulson. You proceed to Upper Opinwood and from thence to Yvel Woods. In Yvel Woods is a bridge to Castle Cimmeria, Scotia's HQ, but you can't get in because the Orcs cut the bridge down (we'll discuss this later on). So you have to go into Yvel City, which is a friendly place. You make lots of friends and get all the ingredients for the cure for King Richard. But then you have to go to the White Tower to assemble the cure. You have to fight loads of ghosts who stand in the walls and hit you, but eventually you get through, and get the cure finally. You return to Yvel only to find that it is under attack by lots of Great Orcs and Cabal Warriors. You fight them off, single-handedly (again, this will be discussed later), and then proceed into the Catwalk Caves, in which it is rumoured that there is an underground passage into Castle Cimmeria. While in the Catwalk Caves, you find that the mental blacksmith Victor is a traitor - shock! horror! but the player doesn't actually care - and then meet two warring races called the Knowles and the Xeobs, and yes, when pronounced, those names sound as stupid as they look. Both of these races offer you passage into Castle Cimmeria if you destroy the other, and you have to kill one set of them. You finally make it into Castle Cimmeria, where you battle your way up onto the third floor, where you cure King Richard and kill Scotia. You return in triumph to Gladstone and are proclaimed Hero of the Realm. And you're dead pleased with yourself.
That was about as short as I could make the summary, and I had to miss out loads of little side-quests, like where the Gorkha Chieftain asks you to kill all the Living Stick People, and when you have to get through a barrier that Scotia puts up in Upper Opinwood. So you can tell it's a very complicated game, and, for the most part, it's done well, with a great deal of quite humourous dialogue. There are a few things that it has to be taken to task over, though.
Number 1: the graphics. Actually, mostly, the graphics are pretty good, for a game produced nearly seven years ago. There are just a few instances that stick out like a sore thumb. The movie sequences are really quite blurry a lot of the time, and when you're about to see a 'special event', you can tell because the picture suddenly goes all fuzzy. Also, people have a disturbing tendency to suddenly pop into existence on the path in front of you. (In fact, these people are more often than not, Scotia, so it is plausible that they would be able to do this. However, one would think this would rather arouse suspicion, yet it doesn't.)
Number 2: the plot. This is ludicrously silly in places. Just off the top of my head earlier, when I was writing the summary, a few things leapt out at me as not being especially believable. The first was that the Orcs on the other side of Castle Cimmeria would cut the bridge down. Granted, this does stop you getting in, but it should have occurred to them that it would also stop them getting out, unless, of course, they are willing to go through the whole bit with the Knowles and the Xeobs, head off through the Catwalk Caves and then try to make their way through Yvel City. I'm willing to guess that they would not be willing to try this. The other point I came across with regard to the plot is that when you get back to Yvel after going to the White Tower, you find out from Geron that the city militia has fallen to an army of Great Orcs and Cabal Warriors (of whom, mysteriously, you have seen no sign while you went through the city). Then you stand outside the Council Chamber for five minutes or so and kill anything that comes near you, and suddenly Ak'Shel declares that you've won the fight! If an entire militia can't keep these guys off, is it at all likely that three individuals could? If you can't answer that question, I'll do it for you: No, it isn't.
Number 3: the monsters. A lot of the baddies in this game were laughable. We have, as far as can remember, in the way of monsters:
wild boar (sometimes brown and sometimes grey, for variety), thugs (ie. someone who stands in Gladstone Forest telling you he'll be taking your money, and when you refuse, attacks you, and you kill him), orcs (who look like miniature gorillas), dimetrodons (defined in the manual as Giant Lizards), a funny looking person with a big axe, ratmen (who are, yes, a blend of rats and men), a big lizard (defined in the manual as a Scavenger), bandits (which are just slightly harder versions of thugs who wear cloaks), cavemen (who are exactly what they sound like), flying spiders (ditto), a funny looking thing with horns and the capability to wallop you one really hard (called a pentrog, according to the manual), Gorkha (interesting creatures with big bulbous eyes, who are your friends), boglytes (which potentially take the biscuit in poor graphics until you meet the Spark Monsters - they are just green or brown or sometimes even yellow blobs), Living Sticks (yes, these are sticks with arms and legs, who for some reason like to steal ceremonial masks from the Gorkha), walking corpses with scythes (sound familiar?), a giant slug (which can only be defeated by casting a kind of green cloud out of a green skull), crab things (which scuttle along the ceiling rather than the floor, presumably because that's easier to animate), giant hornets (not particularly interesting), big bouncing things with buck teeth that can dissolve your armour (not fair!), some very odd looking things that look like walking potato chips (who shout "Illy hilly hill!" to let you know they're coming), giant jellyfish (quite scary actually, but probably only because I don't like jellyfish), long grey worms (not at all scary), rock monsters (ie. rocks with legs), flying worms with two heads (as with the crabs, these probably flew because it was easier to animate), giant orcs (which looked like giant gorillas), some green things that shoot at you (defined as Archer Slugs in the manual), Amazon warriors (that were presumably supposed to look enticing), flying chickens (that shot fireballs, for no apparent reason), wraiths (who, rather unfairly, stood in the walls and hit you), humans with silver armour on (not at all difficult to kill), spark creatures (which were literally just one pixel coloured a light blue colour, definitely the worst monster of the game), the Knowles or the Xeobs (as mentioned above), ghost human warriors with silver armour on (who were slightly harder to kill, but not by much), wheels with eyes (I really want to meet the genius who thought that one up), horse-like animals (who made particularly amusing noises when you threw shirts at them), giant frogs (oh, no!) and, lastly, Scotia herself.
Wow. What a long paragraph. So that's Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos for you. Despite the cussing I seem to have given it here, it really is a good game. Definitely recommended.
Read the review of Lands of Lore II!