Intelligent Game Reviews

Betrayal at Krondor is widely credited with helping to revive the computer role playing game genre a few years back. Any sequel would have big shoes to fill, but would have a rich tapestry upon which to draw. The world of Midkemia created by fantasy author Raymond E. Feist is broad and filled with interesting tales. But a storied development history didn’t help matters. Fortunately the result, Return to Krondor is a solid, entertaining game despite a few problems.

The Story

In Return to Krondor you primarily play the part of Squire James, a reformed thief in the court of Krondor. As the story begins a new court mage has arrived in the city, late at night, and your task is to escort her to the palace to meet with Prince Arutha. Unknown to you, a pirate ship has boarded and sunk a ship belong to some important priests, and a villain known as Bear has tried to get his hands on an important artifact. But the ship sinks before he can recover it from the ship, and his wrath at those he deems responsible cuts a swath of destruction through the city. The main part of the game is your quest to bring Bear to justice for his crimes.

Basics of Play

During the course of play you will control a party of up to four characters. You have no control over who is in the party, depending on the point in the game they will join or leave the party automatically. Character classes include Thief, Priest, Warrior and Mage.

The game is divided into ten chapters. The early chapters all take place in the city of Krondor, later chapters in areas around the city. Annoyingly you don’t control moving from chapter to chapter in most cases. Talking to someone or finishing a battle moves you automatically to the next chapter and in some cases a new location or characters! This was especially annoying at once juncture when you are loaded down with junk to pawn and all of a sudden one of your character is sent into the wilderness where he will eventually lose everything he is carrying and never be able to sell it. Ahem, how annoying.

The game is sort of a mix between an adventure game, with really simple puzzles, and a more traditional RPG. Characters gain experience by completing quests and defeating enemies. Each chapter has a specific task to complete to advance the game to the next chapter, but in some cases there are also a few side quests you can perform. On the whole however the game is very linear in plot development. You have to talk to certain people or do certain things to trigger events that will allow the game to move along. This was a bit disappointing, especially since the game was very short. I finished it in about 15 hours on the medium difficulty level (of three).

The control interface is also a bit of a pain. You can move your party by clicking or using the arrow keys, but navigating the 3D characters in front of the 2D backgrounds while the camera switches around can be very disorienting and hard to manage. Similarly annoying was the inventory system. You pick up a lot of stuff in the game. But you have to move it around one thing at a time, often to small spots on the screen. This made looting the dead and dealing with inventory a real hassle, far more time consuming than it needed to be.

The story and plot isn’t particularly deep, but it was satisfying. As was the experience, alchemy and magical system. Alchemy allows you to make your own potions (very helpful!) and you can buy recipes or experiment to discover new formulas. As you gain experience your characters may go up a level. This grants them extra hit and spell points as well as bonus points you can use to improve their skills. These can be things like bladed combat, bow, initiative, defense, shield, the various magic schools, and thief skills. Each character starts with a fixed set of skills they can learn and a rating in each. Using your bonus points you can improve the skill levels as you se fit.

Combat

Combat is resolved in turns, with characters taking a turn based on their initiative. In general the higher the initiative the sooner in a turn the character can act. In each turn a character may move and attack, use an inventory item (including equipping or unequipping a weapon) or cast a single spell.

Characters have a fixed number of hit and spell points. If a character is reduced to zero hit points he does not die unless all characters in the party are so reduced. If at least one remains standing, the others will be revived to one hit point, but they do not get any experience for the battle. Spell points can be used to cast spells, no surprise. Based on the skill of the mage or priest in various schools of magic different spells may be cast. The more powerful spells require more spell points to cast of course, and even the bets mage can only cast a handful of the best spells before running out and needing to rest. The variety of spells was interesting, though in practice there were a few that were used over and over, since they were cheap to cast and quite effective or expensive but devastatingly powerful.

For the most part I liked the combat. Attacking was pretty easy, and you could choose the attack style of a party member to go for the kill or to fight cautiously which added an extra dimension. What I did not like was how movement was handled. Very often it seemed characters would block one another where the bad guys would not be blocked. This made no sense at all and is either a bug or a seriously annoying design flaw.

In general game difficulty really didn’t influence combat much, though foes were tougher on the higher levels. What really did change was the amount of experience you got for combat, thus meaning you would go up levels a lot slower on the higher difficulty levels, which made the end game a much bigger challenge.

Graphics, Sounds, etc.

Return to Krondor supports 3D cards for the animation and look of the characters and for lighting effects. However, the main interface is actually 2D backdrops that the 3D characters move in front of. On the whole it did not seem very different using the software rendering vs. Glide on my Voodoo2 card. I thought the game looked quite good in software rendering and the screen shots here are from the software rendered version.

The visuals of the locations were nicely done and pretty realistic looking, with a few exceptions. The sewers were a bit questionable with their green sewage, but I pick at nits. The really bad part about the visuals was the constantly switching camera angle. The intent, it seems, was to add a cinematic feel to the game by moving the camera point of view as you walked around. All it really did was make things more confusing and often harder. You might know a door is right there, but you can’t see it so you can’t click it to open it. Or worse, in the aforementioned maze-like sewers, it made it very difficult to keep your bearings straight.

The awkward camera angles also meant in small places you often could not see something important. In two vital areas if you were not aware you could “change the camera angle” you would 1) not be able to fight a mage and 2) pick up important items that are required to advance in the game. This is simply unforgivable in my opinion, especially since in most places you cannot change the camera position!

Sound effects were generally good, although the grunts in combat left a lot to be desired. I liked the use of ambient sounds and the background music was excellent. Voice acting was pretty solid as well, although the recording level of the court mage was often too low and it was difficult to tell what she was saying at times. Still, a solid effort.

The Verdict

Although overall the game has some problems: too short, awkward control and view interface, and sometimes weird chapter breaks, the plusses outweigh the minuses. If you like your role playing games a bit more cerebra
l and not frantic, the good graphics, interesting magic and combat systems, and well crafted story line make Return to Krondor a game worth playing.

Return to Krondor Screenshots

Time to do a little shopping in the rich quarter of the city.	The inventory and magic screens are nice looking, but a bit awkward to use.
The quick navigation maps do away with a lot of slow walking around, thank goodness.	The turn-based combat system is nicely done and allows for a lot of different approaches.

No related posts.

If you're using the above images on your website, please link back: <a href="http://intelligames.nodblog.com/return-to-krondor-review/">Return to Krondor Review</a> Thank you!