Alundra

"A hideously unplayable poor-man's Zelda"

One of the most outstanding titles for the SNES back in its day was Zelda: A Link to the Past. It combined basic RPG overtones with action-adventure and platform elements to provide a thoroughly enjoyable gaming experience. It was the third in a line of games that started on the NES, and was the best (excluding the later Gameboy and N64 games).

Like all great ideas, however, it spawned its imitators, and Working Designs' take on the theme is one of those imitators. Even sporting a main character who looks like he could've been separated from Link at birth, Alundra is basically a Zelda variant for nostalgic PlayStation owners who enjoyed the original Nintendo series.

The game follows the story of a young elf boy with the unique ability to travel into dreams and rescue people from fatal circumstances. Your quest begins on a strange isle you arrive at having been shipwrecked in a vicious storm. For those familiar with the aforementioned Zelda titles, the core mechanics and structure of Alundra are the same. The proceedings are displayed in a top-down, 2D fashion, and your character can interract with the surrounding landscape by jumping on platforms and ledges, operating machinery, pushing or picking up large objects as well as talking to other on-screen characters. Also, like Zelda, the basic object of the game inloves acquiring as much information and clues from village dwellers as possible, working through the dungeons, solving the puzzles and beating the bosses that lie within whilst (hopefully) acquiring new and useful items along the way.

It all sounds nice in theory, but I believe that Alundra fails to deliver the goods in terms of playability or overall enjoyment. Allow me to explain why in deatail.

One of the first things that struck me about this game was it's speed, or lack of it. The game plays like treacle, and Alundra himself movs like he's wading through the stuff whilst wearing very heavy iron boots. Even when he's supposed to be running! That could almost be forgiven if it wasn't for the fact that the graphics in this game actually make it very difficult to play.

Whilst Alundra's influential Nintendo forebearers go for a straight top-down perspective, Alundra tries to be clever by attempting to anticipate depth and height in the landscape. A feature it does not do well at all. At frequent times, I found myself stuck at certain points in the game as the unclear graphics made it impossible to judge the height of a platform in relation to my character. In addition to that, there were a lot of inconsistencies, where a platform of one height could be accessed via jumping, but another of roughly the same height could not. Or where standing on a patch stone paving beforehand made the difference between being able to jump on a stone wall or not. These points may sound trivial to some, but I do not expect to be fiddling with such cretinously awkward pixel precision in my games in this day and age. Two dimensions or not. The fact that such silly features were included as an attempt at providing some sort of added dimension (no pun intended) to the puzzles is laughable at best and positively idiotic at the very worst.

If all of this wasn't bad enough, Working Designs decide to marry these facets of risible unplayability to banal puzzles (some of which require almost psychic levels of foresight to solve) and sluggish loading times. Whilst loading times normally do not bother me at all, I did find the waiting between screens on this game to be unusually long. Although this could just be my impatience at such a decidedly unplayable gaming experience. In addition to this, the game's remarkable similarity to the old Zelda games made me feel like I was playing some kind of bogus clone. Which -in effect- I was. If Working Designs had adapted the idea to a different kind of setting altogether, the similarities between this and Link's escapades could perhaps be forgiven somewhat.

A lot of people laud this game for it's supposed difficulty. I personally didn't find it especially difficult at all, just annoying and frustrating. I did manage to make it through to the end, but didn't find the experience entertaining or rewarding in any way. In fact, I consider it to have been a total waste of my time and I didn't appreciate the developers' cheap attempt at difficulty with sluggish controls and oblique puzzles.

But it wasn't all bad, there were some neat touches such as the music (the main Inoa theme was pretty funy! ^_^), but there really wasn't enough good to outweigh the bad.

So all in all, Alundra is a thorougly disappointing little game. It did nothing for me at all, and as much as I love my PSX, I hated putting it through the indignity of playing this awful little game. If you like RPGs, there are plenty of purer games of that type more worthy of your attention, and if you like your RPGs with a bit more action to them, then you'd be better off with Square's Brave Fencer. Don't deprive yourself of sleep over this. It ain't worth it.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 11/01/99, Updated 11/01/99