Return to Krondor

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Review: Return to Krondor

Five years ago, Betrayal at Krondor was a hit. Its announced successor, Return to Krondor, took a long detour. Now it's finally arrived, and we get a chance to follow the fortunes of Raymond E. Feist's Midkemian inhabitants in another tale of adventure, deceit, magic, and combat. Through 11 chapters, your party members seek to regain a sunken artifact, the Tear of Ishap, in a race against the forces of a mad, monstrously powerful adversary.

The visuals are easily the most immediately striking feature: 2,500-plus 2D attractive backdrops deployed in 16-bit color. These combine with PyroTechnix's proprietary True3D engine for characters and objects, producing overlays that generally work well due to a clever choice of camera angles, warm, localized lighting effects, and subtly exaggerated perspectives. Somewhat less successful are the various character screens-attributes, spellcasting, and inventory-with black backgrounds, small, hard-to-read white fonts, and static 2D images.

Fortunately, the writing is effective and full of character, though the dialogue trees are more annoyingly for show than anything else. The vocal acting is variable, ranging from very good (Jazhara, Kendaric) to chronically hammy (the Scribe, Gerard, etc.). Return's soundtrack significantly enhances the atmosphere.

But in some respects, Return is surprisingly more traditional than Betrayal. The latter supplied over a dozen elaborate but optional mini-quests with tangible rewards and perils. Return has very few in the entire game. Betrayal infused its casual battles, unrelated to the main plot, into a series of underlying major events, each with its own internal logic (a high-level magic user sent by a specific enemy to ambush your party at a farmhouse, for instance). The casual battles in Return's first several chapters return to the primitive days of Bard's Tale I: you knock on residences, enter, and fight. In short, Betrayal felt like a universe. Return feels like a beautifully visualized pencil-and-paper RPG.

Betrayal offered two interesting subgames-within-the-game: complicated area traps and clever word riddles on chests. Both, alas, are missing from the current release. (No doubt victims of the corporate view that we gamers possess the intelligence of staple guns.) In their place, Return provides disarming/lock-picking and alchemy. The former is moderately entertaining at first, with three-part trap mechanisms that require decent reflexes to open. The alchemy system is a uniform bore. There's no goal to shoot for since every recipe almost always succeeds and ingredients are usually cheap or easy to scavenge. Why weren't recipes incorporated as quest objects?

In several other important ways, though, Return matches or surpasses its classic ancestor. The game provides a nicely tiered, well-paced series of combat challenges so that you aren't always facing the same antagonists under identical conditions and battle strategies. The intuitive combat system supplies flank-attack bonuses, initiative checks, guard and defense options, a host of weapons, and 60 spells.

The enemy AI is-how shall I put this?-good enough to be bad. All opponents are rated for attributes and skills like your adventurers; the dumb or inexperienced ones simply attack whomever is closest. At higher levels, they gang up on a single character or shoot at the mage in the back row.

Though Return doesn't retain the innovations of its predecessor, the newer game remains good fun, with attractive visuals, a solid plot, and an excellent combat system.-- Barry Brenesal / GamePro