Return to Krondor

"Many interesting features, but just as many major faults"

Released by Sierra in 1998, Return to Krondor is the second of two PC RPGs situated in Midkemia, the fantasy world of the author Raymond E. Feist. Its predecessor, Betrayal at Krondor, is widely considered one of the best PC RPGs ever made, offering a perfect mix of a vast world to explore, a rich storyline and good game mechanics. Return to Krondor has big shoes to fill, and I can say in advance that it fails to do so for the most part. While it's an interesting RPG in its own right, with a fair number of good points, it also fails in other important areas and fails to be more than a mixed bag, let alone to rival Betrayal.

Return to Krondor takes place about a year after the last game, and centers around Squire James (well known to the readers of Feist's books) and his party racing to recover a lost artifact before the forces of evil do. The game is divided in ten chapters, the first of which take place in the city of Krondor, and the remainder in the area outside it. Throughout most of the game, you have little freedom in where to go, with only one chapter allowing some wilderness explanation. Mostly, you have to walk around in the few areas you are allowed to access, chop up some enemies, talk to some people and eventually figure out how to finish the chapter. The storyline is, admittedly, fairly good, particularly during the first part of the game when you are still unravelling conspiracies in Krondor. After that it all slows down a bit, and bumps through a few ups and downs to a somewhat disappointing ending. Still, I've seen a lot worse, and one can at least say Return to Krondor tries.

The game's visuals are pretty stunning, and a definite strong point of the game is how it manages to draw vivid backgrounds that make the game come to life, and make each area feel unique. There are vast differences between the shady alleys of Krondor, the dense forests outside the city, and the dark temple of undead warriors the party will find itself in later in the game. Most of the graphics tend toward the gloomy, which lends the game at lot of atmosphere but does get a little repetitive eventually. The game's characters are very well drawn, including good facial expressions, as long as everybody stands still. Animation is, unfortunately, not nearly of the same quality. Lips do not move as characters talk, expressions do not change whether they are exchanging friendly banter or fighting for their lives, and the way characters move from one place to another looks downright silly at times. The atmosphere is frequently broken before a fight starts, as every combatant walks to their assigned spot in this battle, draws their weapon, and waits for everybody else to get where the game wants them to be. In several instances, I've seen enemies step aside to allow James to walk to some spot behind them so that the battle can start. It's humorous the first time, but the third or the fourth time you're getting impatient for the action to start, and irritated that the gloomy mood is broken once more by silly maneuvering.

Similarly mood breaking is the sound, at times. While sound effects like monsters growling and swords striking steel sound very good, all dialogue in the game is voice acted, and with very varying quality. Some characters consistently sound too loud, others too soft (especially during scenes with loud background music), and in many cases characters sound way too disinterested considering what they say. (''What? So and so died? Oh dear. That is so terrible. Yawn. I'll have my revenge.'') Accents tend to be overdone, too, to the point of making some characters pretty hard to understand. It's not as bad as in King's Quest 8, but definitely going for the silver medal. Music, on the other hand, is very well done. There is perhaps a little too much repetition in the tunes, but most of them (particularly some of the battle themes) sound very good and at times gripping. Battles with legendary or otherworldly enemies are backed up by a Latin (I think) choir, creating a very impressive, haunting effect.

Getting back to the visuals for a bit, most areas have several possible camera viewpoints, and you can switch between them at your will. No full scrolling is possible, but you can often view a room from multiple angles, and will rarely be disappointed by how sharp and finished every picture looks. However, there are too many cases where the camera angles do not include what you really need. Sometimes a door is hard to spot because none of the camera angles seems to want to show it to you. Other times, when you really need to change the angle because half of your party is off screen, suddenly there isn't another one available. At one point, I was fighting a battle in a big hall where I had no less than five camera angles to choose from, but none of them gave me a good overview of the action.

Much like the graphics, the game's mechanics are a strange hybrid of brilliant moments and surprisingly bad mistakes. Like Betrayal, Return to Krondor uses a skill system, where everything from using certain types of weapons to spotting ambushes is covered by a skill score. Unlike Betrayal, you have experience points and levels in Return to Krondor, and every level gained gives you new skill points to distribute. The system works fine in theory, but in practice you get far too many skill points at once. You can easily max out James' weapon skills in the first two chapters of the game, and then for the rest of the game wonder what you'll waste your skill points on now. You can sink points in such skills as Evaluation, Perception and Stealth, only to discover that they have little or no effect in the game. Many characters can wield several types of weapons, but there are almost no cases where there isn't one strongly preferred over all the other options, making the rest of their weapon skills useless.

One aspect of the skills system that has been very well done, on the other hand, is magic. The game has a total of 60 spells, divided in six categories, and given appropriate arcane names. No Fire 1 and Ice 3 here; you'll have access to such beauties as Contest of Wills, Thy Foes Enfeebled and The Beast Within. The spell's effects vary almost as much as the names do, from simple direct damage spells to a wide range of party support and enemy confounding enchantments, as well as powerful combat spells with a nasty twist. More spells are unlocked as your mages sink skill points in the appropriate category and it'll take several playthroughs of the game just to test them all out. As an extra strategic twist, spells can be cast either hastily (with a chance of failure depending on the mage's power compared to the spell's potency) or slowly (costing an extra turn, but guaranteeing success if the mage isn't interrupted). That brings us to combat: your party and the enemy take turns moving across the battlefield, striking at nearby opponents, or unleashing magic and arrows at each other. Much attention has been paid to which kind of armor stops which weapons (it is almost impossible to harm a character in plate mail with an edged weapon), the distance characters can move based on how heavy their packs are, and such details as enemies getting free strikes at your back if you try to disengage to move to another foe. Other options are conspicuous by their absence: injured characters fight just as well as healthy ones (whereas past injuries were a major factor in Betrayal), and it is not possible to run from any battle in the game.

Another feature that have to be mentioned is the choice of difficulty level at the start of the game. You have a choice between easy, medium and hard which affects combat as whole, strengthening or weakening enemies, and you can also choose how powerful magic and physical attacks are compared to each other. Want a game where both your magicians and the enemy's have a supporting role at best, or where there magic is brutally effective and James just sort of watches with sword in hand? It's all possible. Another noteworthy feature of the game is the disarming of traps on doors and chests. Although you can opt to have it determined by a dice roll against your skills, by far the most fun way to do this is to disable the trap yourself, first analyzing the type of trap and then choosing from a variety of tools to disarm it in a test of reflexes. Choosing the right tool for the job ensures it's easy; pick a poor one and you'll have to click exactly at the right moment to keep from setting off the trap. In another interesting, rarely seen feature, your mages can brew potions from alchemic ingredients, although you typically find such an enormous abundance of potions of all kinds along the way that this is a novelty at best.

Return to Krondor is a game that tries hard, that much is for sure. It has many interesting options that other RPGs lack, and is worth a look for those alone, but it failed to build a good game around them. There are just too many little irritations, like the quirky camera angles to bad voice acting that I mentioned before. Less forgivable, the game is too easy overall. This is mostly thanks to a ridiculous abundance of good weapons and items, often very early in the game. If your mage finds a staff containing the most powerful spell in the game in the first chapter, and can use it once every battle for the remainder of the game, there is something very wrong with the balance. Cranking up the difficulty setting doesn't help much, it merely makes battles more fluky by letting the win or loss be decided by who gets the first strike. If it's the enemy and they decide to move in and strike down your defenseless mage at full health, it's over. If it's you, you just use that overpowered staff again and watch half of them fall.

All in all, Return to Krondor is the perfect example of a mixed bag. If you can find it cheap and you want to see some new and interesting stuff, you'll want to pick it up. It isn't such a long game, so you'll likely be able to see it through before getting too annoyed with its weaknesses. But if you were hoping for a good RPG overall, or for a worthy successor to Betrayal at Krondor, this game regretfully fails to be either.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 05/01/04