Dungeons & Dragons: Eye of the Beholder

"A classic re-made... not too.. oh wait, it IS shabby"

OK. First things first. I love Dungeons & Dragons in general. I have most of the games that came out on PC, including the old AD&D games. Let me say that I STILL play most of them. I know, sad huh?

Well, lets get onto business.

Gameplay: 8/10

What can I say, it's classic AD&D controls formatted for the GBA. Non-battle scenes are in first person walking down gloomy tunnels, etc. When you are in battle, it goes to... umm... I guess it's called bird's eye view. You can automatically see all enemies involved in the battle, and you go through a series of menus to perform actions.

Character generation... All I can say is that it's confusing and annoying. Unlike many games that are based on the Forgotten Realms, you CAN'T(that's right, CAN'T) modify the attributes after they are rolled, which makes for weaker characters than most other games(unless you have a LOT of time on your hands).

Graphics: 6/10

Seriously, I don't expect much from GBA games, but in Eye of the Beholder, it doesn't feel like much was done to improve the already poor graphics from the original. Aside from the portraits(which there aren't enough of, btw) the entire game is grainy. Really grainy. The in-battle models are, well, horrible. There's pretty much no detail in it. The textures aren't quite as bad, but are still too boring to earn any high points.

Sound: 7/10

7/10.. hmm... I consider this a score which just shows that nothing is taken away, but nothing is really special. The only use I found for the sound is that whenever your press the A button on a wall there is a clang sound UNLESS it's a fake wall. Nice bonus isn't it? lol.

The Manual: 0/10

Honestly, I wouldn't normally rate this, but God I had to protest the crappyness of the manual. Honestly, I don't even know why they put this in the box. Without any real item statistics in the game, you'd think that the manual would supply ANYTHING that would tell a player what weapons and spells do. As far as I've seen, there's kind of a tradition of LARGE and in-depth manuals for AD&D game, but EotB has an undetailed, SMALL manual. Barely any explanation of anything (and all of those are useless) and... argh I can't even type about the thing, it's so ghastly.

Replayability: 4/10

Honestly, with most player-development games, a good chunk of the awesomeness is the fact that you can go through the game with many different characters. EotB is a HUGE exception. Basically, you have for classes to choose from, and up to 7 levels of development (I think). From my experience of 4 attempted times replayed, no matter what, there must be a cleric in the party. If not, you'll be resting WAAAAAYYY too much. Mages are next to useless, since a fighter with a bow is almost always better. So your choices are 1 cleric, then 3 more character slots, rogue or fighter. Whoopity doo, lots of different choices there.

Overall: 5/10

DO NOT BUY THIS GAME (unless you are a fanatic like me;)) I finished it in 2 days - It was summer, go figure - and never really felt the urge to play through the whole thing again, EVER.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 07/20/03, Updated 07/20/03