Secret of the Silver Blades was THE first computer RPG that I ever played based on the AD&D license and I still have yet to find another game that captured my imagination the way it did.
Sure the graphics are ancient and the sound even more dated, but that made you reply upon your imagination more than anything the gaming market has to offer now, and that is what playing a game of D&D was about in the 1st place!
I stayed up many nights playing late, and feeling the effects the next day in class.
The plot-line was excellent and the artwork on the cut scenes was dead on with the mood of the game. The way you equipped and made up your party was very important to the success of the game: you HAD to have a mage and you definitely HAD to have a cleric to succeed. And the character creation process was wonderful too. I would sometimes spend an hour or two just rolling up a character and experimenting with the different head torso hair color combinations you had to choose from. In the end every character looked like a stick man on screen during the battle segments but at least you could give your stick mage a pointy hat!
Some of the best part of this game
was finding something great your party could use like a wand of ice for your mage or healing potions.
The skulking down corridor after corridor did sometimes become tedious and I found myself having to draw maps on paper to find my way around, but the plotline always seemed to pull you forward in a rewarding way.
The way the end boss was drawn in his 4 or 5 color cut scene was a very fulfilling treat in the end and I still remember using many of the plot hooks in my pen and paper games.
I really love this game and recommend it to any die hard RPG fan. You won’t be disappointed.
I'm not sure how well it runs on today’s computers. I still have the original box set and tried running it with no success. The few times I did get it to work the fight segments moved so fast that I couldn’t keep up with what the enemy AI was doing and soon became at a lost as to how to win any sort of battle.
But if you can get it to run well, then you'll be rewarded with many hours of great RPG gameplay. One of the best who's tried and true gameplay outlasts even today's graphics heavy games.
