This game concludes the Krynn trilogy. Coming out just a year after the second game (and two years after the first), The Dark Queen of Krynn features some significant improvements.
After successfully fighting the evil forces trying to conquer Krynn, the supreme evil itself wishes to take over the fight. Once again, it’s time to protect the land!
As in the previous instalments, first you 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 create all-new characters. Oddly enough, you can only add characters fromDeath Knights of Krynn (the second game) and not from the first game Champions of Krynn.
The way you create new characters remains the same. First off, you choose the race, gender, social status and attitude of the characters. Next, you decide on the attributes the character has. You don’t get to assign points, but you can keep repeating the random distribution generator until you’re satisfied with the attributes received (you’ll understand what I mean when you start the game). You do, however, get to choose the look of the character. The characters are icons that you see while in combat mode and you can decide on their appearance by combining some default looks and assigning colors to them. This is a fun but fairly useless feature; it only helps you to distinguish your own men more easily during 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 matter in the fights if you are alone or you have some comrades to help you fight the enemy.
When the adventure begins you start off in quite a small area, where the commander explains the situation to you. Soon after 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 chose to have your character be lawful, you can’t really expect him to steal!
Every now and then you will need to rest. If you’re in a settlement it’s quite easy (you simply go to the inn), otherwise you'll need to set up camp first. There are also other buildings in settlements where you can buy, trade, learn, and gather information.
The gameplay in Dark Queen of Krynn remains somewhat similar to the first two games, although the opponents do get tougher. The biggest difference is in the graphics. This game already features the 256 color VGA graphics, which are much easier on the eyes. The sounds are supported by a SoundBlaster card, but the sound hasn’t really improved all that much. In fact, the sound is less pleasant, even if technically more sophisticated. So get going and make sure that this time you really rid Krynn of all 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.
Part of the Dungeons & Dragons games Series
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