Quest For Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness

"Would be better if not for the ocean of glitches"

This game has gotten some pretty high marks from the other players, and I will not deny that when I saw this in a toy store I thought at once, ''I HAVE to have this game.'' But the game is buggy beyond belief, and that did not change even when it was rereleased as part of the Quest for Glory anthology, and that and a couple other factors take a lot of the wind out of its sails.

So you're our nameless hero, either fighter, wizard or thief, or paladin if you were on your best behavior in previous games. At the height of your victory in the last game you were whisked away from your friends by a magical spell and find yourself in a dank cave with everything except the clothes on your back suddenly missing. You have to find some way to escape, and then find a way to save another land in the grip of impending disaster.

And you won't be one screen out of the cave before you run into the first place a glitch can totally crash the game. There are more of these, at crucial places in the game. I've tried getting programs that my friends said would slow down my computer enough to run this game properly, but they did not work. And since my final score is based on the fun I had with the game and since such things are extremely frustrating, the game suffered.

And the game is self-limiting even without taking the bugs into consideration. Each character pretty much has one unique side quest to them, and that's it. Costs the game much replay value when all that much changes between each character's game is the steps they take to tackle the really major puzzles. I can't imagine anyone being so enamored of the game they play it all the way through so as to see how the thief gets through the swamp as opposed to the wizard.

The combat is awkward as well, especially on a modern pentium dealie where the attacks come so fast and furious that unless you know magic the monsters with distance attacks will have you for lunch because you'll never get close enough to kill them in time. Switching to side-view combat was not a good idea for this game.

The game isn't all bad, though. It's the first game in its series to have recorded speech for its characters, and features some fairly recognizable talent. Some of the performers include Cam Clark (from ninja turtles and Akira), Jennifer Hale, Jeff Bennet, Jim Cummings and John-Rhys Davies. I also really liked how, as you complete various quests, the opinions the xenophobic townspeople have of you visibly change for the better. In previous games characters were pretty much for or against you from the very beginning regardless of what you did.

But I will return to my main complaint that if there had been a better quality control team for this game, it would've ranked much higher. As it stands I can only hope that I might be lucky enough to get my hands on a disk version someday.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 03/31/04