Download Dark Queen of Krynn, The

This game concludes the Krynn Trilogy. This game came out just a year after the second (and two years after the first) game, yet The Dark Queen of Krynn features some improvements.

After successfully fighting the evil forces trying to reign over Krynn, the supreme evil itself wishes to take over the fight. Once again it’s time to protect the land!

Again you first need to build up your party, or import it from the previous game. If you prefer to, or haven’t played the previous game, you can, off course, create all new characters. Oddly enough, you can only add characters from Death Knights of Krynn (the second game) and not from the first game Champions of Krynn. The way you create new characters remained the same. First off you chose the race, gender, social status and attitude of the character. Next you decide upon the attributes the character has. You don’t get to assign points, but you can keep repeating the random distribution until you’re satisfied with the attributes the character has (you’ll understand what I mean when you start the game). But you do get to choose the looks of the character. The characters are icons that you see while in combat mode and you can decide how they will look like (actually you just get to combine some pre-prepared looks and assign colors to them). This is a fun, but fairly useless feature. It only helps you distinguish your own men easier while in combat.

You can create as many characters as you want, but you can only select up to six (although one is enough). I do suggest you make your party as big as possible, because it does mater in the fights if you are alone or you have some comrades to help you fight the opponents.

So when the adventure begins you start off in a quite little place, where the commander explains the situation for you. Quickly upon leaving the camp you are involved in the first fight. After winning a fight (if you lose it doesn’t matter anyway) you get some spoils of war and the party members get important experience points.

As with most RPGs the more points your characters have, the stronger they are! Depending on your choices at the beginning of the game, they also have different skills that will come in handy (from the use of magic, to the stealing skill – but remember, if you selected your character to be lawful, you can’t really expect him to steal).

Every now and again you will need to rest. If you’re in a settlement that’s quite easy (you simply go to the inn), otherwise you need to set up camp first. There are also other buildings in settlements and there you can buy, trade, learn, gather information, etc.

The gameplay remained somewhat similar the first two games, although the opponents did get tougher. The biggest difference is in the graphics. This game already features the 256 color VGA graphics, which are much nicer to the eyes. The sounds support the soundblaster, yet the sound hasn’t really improved all that much (in facts the sound sounds worse, even if technically more sophisticated). So get going and make sure that this time you really rid Krynn of all the evil!

The game features copy protection questions. You can find the answers to them in the Journal, which is also the manual to the game.