In this review, we choose our role in the 16-Bit DOS game Ultima II: the Revenge of the Enchantress. We find out how well this RPG game plays.
This game was released in 1982 and is the second game in this franchise.
We have some experience in this franchise. We previously played Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness. That game wound up being a flop for us. We also played the Underworld spinoff series starting with Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss. That game got quite a great score. After that, we tried Ultima Underworld II – Labyrinth of Worlds. That game got a barely passable score. So, we thought we’d try this next game in the main series to see if we can go two for four in this whole franchise.
You once again assume the role of the avatar. You appear in, I’m guessing, the overworld area of Britannia (though I’m not sure based on the gameplay). The goal, I can only assume, is to locate Lord British to get your quest. There are teleporters on the land, though I found out the hard way that entering them early is a bad idea to some degree.
You start off with a few hundred health and food to sustain you. If you’ve played the previous game, this sounds like a heck of a lot. It is. The only thing to remember is that this winds up compensating for the larger land mass and higher degree of difficulty (yes, it’s actually harder this time around then the previous game if you can believe that).
Instead of starting off with some basic equipment, you seemingly start off with nothing. You have your two hands as weapons and your skin as your armour. It kind of suggests that you start the game randomly popping up naked somewhere in the forest, though technically, there is no nudity in this game because the pixel art leaves much much more to the imagination. This is, after all, an 80s DOS video game.
You can encounter enemies in the overworld at any time. As such, the difficulty is also much much more random. In my first play through, I encountered no enemies before the first town. In my second run through, I encountered nearly half a dozen enemies and entered the first town down a quarter of my health. So, who knows if the game is easy or hard, really. Just don’t go running straight away to take on those monsters in the ocean. It never ends well when you first start the game.
The enemies you encounter are varied. You can encounter a stick figure with horns (barbarian?), a stick figure with an ability to paralyze you from the waist down (devil apparently), a stick figure with a sword (apparently a thief), and, of course, sea monster.
There are two locations you can come across in the initial land mass: a fort and a village. The fort is denoted by the square like symbol and the village is denoted by a series of grey circles. Also available in the area is a tower. You’ll need a torch or a spell to see anything in there and the developers decided to not give you the chance to buy any torches. After all, you can’t have a game that’s too easy, can you? Also, you can’t buy food (you have to step through a teleporter for that) in this area, so you have limited time to get anything in this area.
What is good in this area is the ability to buy a weapon and armour. The game doesn’t tell you what you can and cannot equip based on your stats, it just bars you from equipping it after. Yes, my fighter didn’t have good enough stats to equip a simple sword, making me stick to a dagger instead. Hey, at least I could get some chain armour at least.
In order to equip anything, you need to use a special command. In order to equip a weapon, apparently, players need to figure out on their own that they need to use “R” for “ready”. No prompts, just randomly mashing the keys or looking up a list of commands online just to figure it out. When you do manage to randomly stumble on the right letter, you are given a menu of different weapons to “ready”. You can only equip what weapon you have in your inventory, but apparently, it was necessary to list every weapon in the game in this menu anyway so you can pick the number you have.
Of course, if you find yourself asking how to equip a weapon, yes, the developers decided that one button randomly hiding on the keyboard was too easy for players. Instead, this time around, you needed to use the “W” key for “wear”. Again, up pops a list and you get to select the number that matches what you have in your inventory.
If you think you are getting ahead in the game by collecting items from drops of enemies, well, now that’s mixed. The feature that permits you to sell items in the previous game was stripped out. So, if you can’t use an item, you’re, well, stuck with useless junk in your inventory. This game probably marks one of the rare games out there where gems are actually 100% useless and serve no real role.
Also, that attack system in the overworld from the previous game? Yeah, that’s back. You have to type “A” and quickly press a direction to attack an enemy. If you don’t execute the second part on time, you are forced to “pass” on your turn, letting the enemy take a nice extra swing at you.
Something you might remember form the previous game is the fact that you can restore health by defeating enemies and leaving dungeons. There is, in fact, a dungeon in the first world. It’s a tower surrounded by deadly swamp that removes health from you. Sure, it’s more than possible to get there, but when you “E”nter the tower, you’ll find out that you needed something to “L”ight your way. Since nothing is available, unless you were somehow lucky enough to obtain a torch from defeating an overworld enemy, you’ll be left with a blank screen and seemingly no way to leave. Naturally, you’ll eventually die.
Don’t worry, in your great moment of weakness before death, the game happily saves your game for you, overwriting your other save point which you executed by randomly guessing “Q” to save and “Q” to be unable to quit the game because you have to turn off your computer (or exit DOSBox) to quit.
So, when you find out all of this after the fact, you might be tempted to just start a new character to take advantage of your new found knowledge. Of course, an ability to start a new game apparently was far too feature rich. If you start a new character, the game will spit out an error saying that a character already exists on the disk. Oh, and you have to reset DOSBox to get out of the screen because you have no commands you can use to back out of the screen.
So, how does one create a new character? Hacking. Yes, for something as basic as creating a new character when another one exists, you have to hack the system files to make this happen. you need to find the “player” file in the Ultima2 directory, open it up in a text editor, delete everything in there, save, and close. That’s the only way you can start a new game. To date, I have never encountered this in a game where this is required in this scenario before. A first for everything I suppose.
Oh, and there are limitations to your player stats. The game will notify you of this immediately by deleting everything and forcing you to start over. You can’t have a stat less than 10. If you pick a class after, the game will just adjust the stats for you anyway, half defeating the purpose of customizing your stats to begin with. Hey, at least you can pick your own name at the end of it all.
As you defeat enemies, you’ll gain both gold and experience points. It’s not a lot, but it is going to help you… hopefully.
For me, the painful experience didn’t end there. On my first playthrough, I wanted to know what the grey combs did. Apparently, those were teleporters. I eventually teleported to this tiny island with a castle where Lord British lived. I thought I was making progress only to find out that 44 gold wasn’t enough to do anything with Lord British. With no enemies to fight on the island and no way to get off of it, it seemed like I soft-locked the game (which is why I made a second attempt to play the game in the first place… only to die a horrible death trying to build up a cash flow after getting what looked like half decent equipment.
Basic good game design suggests that the first part of the game is a delicate moment for players. They don’t know anything about the game and need to learn simple things like equipping items, how items work, and how combat works. If your game comes out of the gate saying that it’s going to make your life a living hell partly thanks to poor design, gamers will likely leave the experience early (as was the case for me). The game would have been better if you could buy not just equipment, but also food as well early on like with the previous game. Since this game hammers the new players into confusion and despair, it wound up being pointless to continue for me even with the above knowledge I gained above.
With half the basic features missing early on as well as a lack of a help function or even a proper system to save your game, this game is pretty bad on a technical and design front.
Even simple walking has its flaws. Instead of moving as quickly as your fingers will take you, this game slows down movement to about a space every second and a half. Considering how many spaces you have to move in this game just to understand what is out there, this process can feel like watching paint dry.
Probably the only positive thing I can think of with this game is the fact that gaining gold, experience, and the occasional item makes sense. It’s a very basic element in RPG games, but at least this game, well, has it.
Generally speaking, this game is a disaster. The difficulty curve is extremely steep and the learning curve is almost a cliff, requiring a massive amount of research just to understand basic commands. The system design is pretty bad and downright painful when it comes to creating new characters. I’ve never encountered a game that requires hacking to play a second new character. The fact that you have to turn off your computer to quit is brutal. Even walking is slowed down to a snails pace. This experience wound up being downright brutal for me and compels me to say already that this is a game to avoid.
You’ll probably cringe at what I have to say about graphics. For me, the graphics is very average for a game of its time. I’ve played games with better graphics on the Atari 5200 and 2600. This includes Dancing Plate, Choplifter, and River Raid. The graphics are very mediocre.
Audio is almost non-existent. You have no jingles to speak of (let alone music). Instead, you have some gravelly effect for walking, a beep for walking into a wall, and, heaven forbid, a piercing squeal beeping sound that makes you think the computer is dying if you get paralyzed. A separate effect is available for hits and misses in combat. It’s, well, pretty bad.
Overall, this is probably one of the worst games I’ve played in a very long time. I get that this is an 80s game, but even by that standard, this is a painful one to play. There’s a steep difficulty curve and a cliff of a learning curve. The design is poorly constructed (who designs a game that requires hacking to make a new character?). Walking is painful on top of it all. The only good thing is that you get gold, experience points, and half useless items when you defeat enemies. The graphics are average and the audio is bad. This is definitely one game you want to avoid.
Overall
Furthest point in game: Found Lord British. Got 40 experience points.
General gameplay: 4/25
Replay value: 3/10
Graphics: 6/10
Audio: 1/5
Overall rating: 28%
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
