Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes of the Lance

"For my 50th review, a game that is an utterly worthless piece of trash!"

As a fan of the Dragonlance series of books I thought it was odd that there wasn't any games made of them. Sure there'd been a few AD&D games on the NES (for instance Hillsfar, and Dragon Strike, I swear one day I'll find a good one!), but no Dragonlance. Then one day to my shock I found that there indeed was a Dragonlance game, it was for the NES as well. I thought to myself, well alright could be a fun Dragon Warrior/Final Fantasy style RPG. Or maybe, it'll be like a Ghosts and Goblins game? Sure it'd be strange, considering the fact that it's a story about a group of people, not the lone knight fighting the evil draconian hordes, but damn it that'd be a good game (I for one liked Ghosts 'n Goblins). Well I found the game one day, and decided to buy it, choosing over proven games like The Mafat Conspiracy, and Rad Racer for this garbage. As I played I regretted the purchase very much. I don't know what the hell happened but this game is really quite terrible. There is not one redeemable aspect of this game. I tried to imagine a worse NES game that I've played, but honestly nothing came to mind. Hell I'd rather play that wretched mess Hillsfar over this garbage, and I assure you that game is a lousy pile of dreck. I really can't figure out who in the hell thought any part of this abomination of coding was worth letting out into the public.

So, what is Heroes of the Lance about you might ask? Well if you haven't read the Autumn of Dragons Twilight book, or didn't get a copy of the manual you will not be told. Here is what the opening cinematic (if you can call it that) is this: Prepare to enter Xak Tsaroth. That's it, oh but wait, before you can actually start the game you get a bunch of still portraits of the heroes that you'll be using to accomplish your vague goal. Evidently your mission in this game is to retrieve the Disk of Mishakal. Why you need it, I don't know, I haven't read the book in a while so I'm a bit fuzzy on the importance of the disk (and really you only find out that's what you're there for when you die), I assume to stop the Dragon army (as mentioned in the book mentioned above). Aside from that, there's really nothing in the way of storyline.

Graphically the game is awful. I do realize that this is an NES game, but even by their standards the graphics are pitiful. First off, the bottom half of the screen is dominated by character portraits and their life bars. It wouldn't be such a bad thing if the character portraits weren't a terrible blend of lighter brown against darker brown with some black and white background. There's also a small compass-like indicator on the screen that'll show you when you can go through a door. Which really does next to nothing since going one direction really doesn't change where you end up. It goes to the same place regardless. Also it really doesn't help the fact that the environments hardly differ from one another. They all look the pitiful amalgamation of gray, more gray, and a terrible pastel green. It's like it was the progenitor of the graphics engine of Breakdown (yeah, I admit it was a cheap shot what of it). The character models look equally awful, like I said, I acknowledge that this was the NES, but still look at the models in Bionic Commando, Vice: Project Doom, the models look good in those, but they look quite stupid here. The coloring on them looks blah, and really not one of them look good, the only one that I think doesn't look terrible is Raistlin Majere (the mage), he looks… okay. Although I do suppose they got Riverwind's look down, considering she looks like a tough Amazon chick, which really what she was in the books (barbarian, Amazon big difference). The enemies are also pretty bland. The human enemies look gangly and ugly, the trolls, are fundamentally a palette-swapped version of the humans, but with a club. There's also the half-naked dwarves, who seem to be quite keen to assail your crotch. I suppose it's probably the only spot they could hit, unless they had weapons I'd wager. The ones it look like they actually focused any sort of time on was the Draconians and whatever the hell the other green winged guys are supposed to be, another type of Draconian I guess. They looked alright, but still, it's nothing noteworthy. One of the other typical enemies you'll encounter is something that looks like some sort of claymation dinosaur from the days of yore. I suppose they're supposed to be dragon whelps, but they don't look that great. It's also amusing that they vomit to attack you, and I tell you they just dole out the damage.

Audio is also a bland affair. The music for the most part stinks, and it's basically the same thirty seconds looped through and through. Unfortunately there's precious little to the music variety, sure the first few times they might sound adequate, but that turns for the atrocious quickly. Couple with it that the battle sounds are also less than stellar it's an atrocious affair. There's no variation with the impact sounds. Also the characters when they get hurt and make that “oof” sound that most games offered back then does not change from character to character. The female cleric also sounds just like the other characters. Hell the enemies sound all the same as well. Every last one of them. Fortunately there's really no voice acting to gripe about.

So if the story is abysmal the graphics less than pleasing, and the audio a boring affair, the gameplay must be good. Right? Unfortunately there is not one thing that is good about this game. For one thing at the start of the game you start out facing a large gaping chasm. The game gives absolutely no idea on what to do or where to go. Naturally I assumed that maybe I was supposed to try to leap the pit, only to kill off my cleric. That's also something that I think is quite perplexing, instead of having one of the big burly warrior types taking point, they have the cleric, who you have to keep alive, out front. And you really do need to keep her alive, because if she dies (falls in a pit) you have no chance of accomplishing your goal. You won't be able to heal any of your party members, or raise them from the dead. So, after killing off a few of my party members trying to pass the impassable pit I soon figured out that I was supposed to go up. Which I really sort of figured out by blind luck, by the way, that I found myself in another room. Which led me to the first fight against, a half-naked dwarf. Fighting in the game is atrocious, you have to plant your feet on the ground and then just slug away at them. Which did little to aid in the fight with the dwarf, you'd figure that since it looked like it was cutting up his head, that he'd die. No such luck, because you have to hold down the down button, even for the Kender (Halfling) thief and the dwarf warrior, which makes no since at all, considering that they'd be the same height as the marauding semi-nekkers dwarf, but nope. You still have to aim down to hit the little bugger (no pun intended), with a good two thirds of my party dead I figured it was high-time to pick up the sword dropped on the ground. Only I didn't know how to. They used a system like in Dragon Warrior where you have to go into a menu (in this case on the select button, unlike pressing A in DW to get the menu) and choose take item. It worked in Dragon Warrior, but doesn't really jive in this game. I don't know why it's just a major pain in the ass in this game. Hell most times it's not even worth picking up the items, because it's either some useless gem, or some equally useless pouch. I'm positive that you could somehow use the pouches and other bags to increase the amount of crap you can hold, but I'll be damned if I could figure it out.

The magic system is equally frustrating to use. To cast the spell you have to break off from combat, and switch your hero to Raistlin to somewhere in the first four slots in the party menu, and then go and choose which spell to cast. The spells include charm, which as near as I could tell did nothing. Sleep, which rarely worked, detect magic, detect invisible, and a spell called Final Strike, which also did nothing (as far as I could tell). There are really only two semi useful spells in the game; Magic Missile, and Burning Hands. Neither of which are particularly effective, because the spells curve either upwards or downwards. Which makes trying to pick an enemy from far off fundamentally impossible, because usually it'll just fly over their heads, and they just wander up to you and just stab you (or beat you as the case may be). Also for some reason if you shoot a spell when you're less than a couple of inches away from you, you'll miss them for no appreciable reason. Maybe they'll somehow teleport to the other side of you, or just not take any damage. The clerical spells are a touch more useful, but are all the more frustrating. Using cure light wounds replaces very little health on your health meter. The only one that you'll ever really use is Cure Critical Wounds, and that just tears through your mana like no ones business. I'm sure there's some use for protection from evil, prayer and spiritual hammer, but truly I never found any need for them. The only other two that are of any use are raise dead (for the obvious reason of raising your KO'ed characters), and deflect dragon breath, which you won't even use until the end of the game. Hold person is only really mildly useful for the off-chance that you're attacked by more than one enemy. Oh and if your cleric dies forget about killing the final boss, because you need deflect dragon breath to beat the damn thing.

There's also no particular reason why you should even bother picking anything up in the game. There were no shops that I came across, so the gems and goblets just take up the precious item space you have. The potions in game are infuriating to use, they come with no handy descriptors, so you have to waste the damn things just to see what the hell it does. So you'll waste the mana potion you desperately needed for your cleric, or the spell caster, on your damned fighter! Or some melee combat modifier on one of your spell casters! Instead it just says: “brown potion” or “blue potion” leaving you in the lurch as to what they do. The swords and shields, and other weapons you find really have no beneficial purpose. Hell even equipping your characters with their default weapons really shows no advantage. I checked, wailing on your enemies with your equipped ax won't really do much more damage than with your seemingly no weapons (despite the fact that the characters are clearly holding a sword, or whatever). A couple of the characters (Tanis, and Riverwind) have bows, but I could not figure out how to actually use the blasted things. I tried attacking from a distance, and nothing happened, they just swiped with their swords. Another perplexing aspect of the combat is the fact that characters other than the one you're actively using will take damage. Once I was using Sturm (as a fighter I likened him to be the best to use in a brawl) and Flint who was the fourth guy on the top row of the party was taking damage. It made positively no sense. Oh and when any members of the party dies in combat he just lays there, so you can still raise him, unless you leave the room, then he's permanently dead. It can be quite irritating if you spell caster dies and you accidentally leave the room, so you're without your precious magic missile for the rest of the game. It doesn't help that the save system really is a terrible little thing. If you accidentally hit the reset button any save files you had are gone. Or if you should just hit the power button, more often than not it'll also delete your saves. All that work, down the tubes. Although you'd have to be quite tenacious to actually play this wretched mess to completion. Also it is worth noting that the game can be completed in about an hour and a half. I know, because I did just that, however the game just tries to artificially lengthen itself by making all of the rooms look alike.

It's sad, this game could've actually been good. They could've done something to the effect of Final Fantasy, or Ghosts and Goblins and actually made the game something good. Unfortunately it's really just a pitiful mess of a side scrolling hack and slash, with atrocious gameplay, hideous graphics, and painful audio. Fortunately there's really not much of a chance that you'll get to play this game (outside of emulation that is), but none the less this game should be avoided at all costs. There is not one redeemable aspect of this dreadful game. Instead I'd recommend better fantasy gaming on the NES, games like: Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, Ghosts and Goblins, Castlevania. Hell even the dreadful Castlevania II: Simon's Quest is better than this rubbish. Oh yeah, also I think you just read the book, because this game doesn't cover the whole story.

Graphics: 1
Sound: 1
Gameplay: 1
Lasting Appeal: 1

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 02/20/08

Game Release: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes of the Lance (US, January 1991)