I was mostly into the Sierra games as a kid. I bought the Heroes of the Lance more because of my being into the books than the type of game I liked. This is a 2-D dungeon crawler. This was probably as nice as a 2D dungeon crawler got before 3D first person like Castle Wolfenstein took the gaming world by storm.
The characters are all from the Dragonlance books. Very faithful in stats, equipment, and look. However, they all played pretty equally, even Tasselhoff, which was actually less enjoyable for me at the time.
The idea that Goldmoon and Tas held their own as well against draconian as machines like Tanis and Sturm Brightblade did seem right.
You move your way from left to right, right to left on a level, killing bad guys that come from the opposite direction you are moving. All characters have distance attacks if you equip the weapon: bow and arrows, sling/hoopak, or throwing axe. Goldmoon and Raistlin have distance attacks with spells. I would often save their energy for healing spells.
I moved through characters balancing distance attacks (run out of arrows, move to a character with axes) and how much health they had (Tanis too low, trade him for Brightblade).
As I said before, you move from left to right, right to
left on a level. I was very confused at the beginning from playing Bard’s Tale where the mapping was 3D and very extensive. I would have gone left to right, gone through a doorway—into the screen if you will (z-axis), and in Bard’s Tale you would now be traveling down a hallway 90 degrees perpendicular to the previous hallway. Not so in Heroes of the Lance as far as I could tell. I finally started thinking of it as a series of drag race lanes. There were various doorways between lanes, but you only ever traveled/fought along the lane.
Eventually you find one of those doors along the hallway takes you down to the next level. I never really knew where I was. I never really did any mapping. You just want to get down to the next lower level. I don’t remember any bosses per se, at any level. There were sections of a couple levels that looked like the floor was all broken. You can actually do a bunch of jumping and saving and get through. I didn’t figure that out for a while.
You fight through all the levels until you get to the final level against the dragon. The dragon isn’t really a boss. Reading the end of the first book of the Chronicles tells you which character to use with what weapon and the dragon is overcome with a click. End of game.
The graphics are in the characters and the weapons. The “hallway scenery” varies very little- a castle hallway look, a sewer look, a classical ruins look, and a black background look.
Pretty basic, but it kept me mildly entertained as a freshman in high school.
