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A Good Game, For Its Time

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: July 25, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Dungeon Master II offers an enticing set of features for a game produced in the early 1990s: the game is non-linear, real-time, and full-color, with simple, easy-to-understand melee combat, a wealth of weapons, spells, treasure and artifacts, and many and diverse monsters to slay. It also features a complete and interesting sound-track, and "geographic audio" sound effects, which increase in intensity the closer you are to the monsters you're fighting.

The premise of the early game is simple - you control a party of four characters outside the grim fortress of Skullkeep trying to collect the clues, keys, and puzzle pieces which will allow you to gain access to the fortress. Combat is largely hack and slash, and each weapon has a series of moves which your characters can perform with it according to their skill level: as your characters level up, they unlock new moves, but each move requires more time and skill to pull off successfully.

Magic in Dungeon Master 2 is highly unusual for its time in that the manual does not explain the necessary magic components to cast a spell. Thus, while spells in the game are pre-determined, the player must discover the rules of magic within the world through trial and error, and the manipulation of the dozens of different spell component combinations. While this makes casting magic in and of itself an interesting feature of the game, some areas of the game can only be passed through the aid of certain spells, and the determined player will eventually be faced with the long, arduous task of sitting down and mapping out every single spell combination.

The early outside part of the game is really quite fun, and features many interesting weapons and artifacts. Best of all, this part of the game allows for infinite replay because the monsters respawn after several minutes, allowing your characters to continue to level up even after you have solved the necessary puzzles to move deeper into the game.

The biggest difficulty of the game lies in the many fiendishly difficult puzzles which occur within Spellkeep itself. The manual is of absolutely no help with these, and some of the puzzles are so unusual that basic logic is not of great help either. In addition, the difficulty of the traps and monsters within the keep are so much greater than those in the early outside monster areas that character death is annoyingly frequent. And while in-game resurrection is possible, it requires a fair amount of backtracking. Another limitation of the game is that though it is in real-time, combat occurs on a grid, and it is very easy to get boxed in by enemies and quickly killed.

Overall, Dungeon Master II is a fun, addictive game in the early levels, but features a highly difficult mid and end-game which may turn away all but the most dedicated of players.

Sequal to the cutting edged game that made my jaw drop in 1986!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: November 25, 2007
Author: Amazon User

The II part of Dungeon Master is pailed in comparison to the first edition. It is still a great game. This is the MAC version, I am surprised it even released for MAC at all. The PC and MAC are Identical. The game revolves around a single starting character named "Torham Zed"(probably the duke of bane's ville availble as a choice in part one.) You have less control over your character developement at the first too as you can nolonger re-encarnate them for a specific player requirement but only resurrect with the default class skills. Zed has good well rounded starting skills and attributes and you will have little trouble on any path you take him, very generous bonuses for having to play him as a default choice. the others are more difficult at times and not to generous in some cases. In the first game, the advantage of re-encarnating was to gain sometimes(not always) huge hikes to your attribute scores yet loose out on all your classes. This allowed for more powerful and focused characters at expense of less well rounded scores in careers. Yet you could always ressurect if you liked. rarely you would gain attribute points in an area not needed for your career choice yet the career skills of pyro-mastery were more beneificial as when you gained it was a big one! The area of leveling has been retooled so now you can more depend on a gain in the attribute asscoiated with the class you chose to develope. In the case of fire and mage resistance, you have to take it to get it. Uggo the Mad and Seri are two high saving through classes(if you could call it that) that resist better at saves than they do anything else. The have noting in the way of stats except for these saves. That is fine in that most characters are more physical or mental and these are the ones who take it. A unique choice. The stat scores are similar but not exactly as the are in the D&D system, this is NOT D&D dungeon mastering despite the title for those ignorant of this great game. It is a dungeon crawl and pioneered the graphicly advanced VGA dungeon crawl as most games in 1986 were EGA or Tandy 16. This part 2 waw a recap made in 1997 but is not much in the way of improvement except a few outdoor areas and a pretty rainy atmosphere, it is a good look back at nostalgia and just as fun or more so than the original. You can bargin down merchants(primitive dialogue as they are) and your levels and stats increase in much the same way. The original dealt with a huge dungeon in the side of a mountain and some evil devil named "CHAOS" this one deals with the overland of that and finding the regions of the four clans of Skullkeep. You deal with the "ZO-gate" based on the spell by the same prefix. An interdimentional gate for a deamon to transpose to owr dimension.(no spoilers all in the diagram map included in box!) This is a game for smart people and if you don't know what I'm taling about, stick to shooters or go stock a wally world!

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