Gorasul: The Legacy of the Dragon

There are two ways to make a game that heavily 'emulates’ one of its rivals in the genre. The first is to take the elements from the game you ire paying homage to and add ral new features of your own.

The second way is to simply rip it off hook, line and sinker and change the name and storyline a bit so nobody knows what you’ve done. Gorasul falls somewhere in the middle of these two approaches. The gameplay is distinctly Balder-esque in nature, from the locations which are heavily populated with NPCs you can converse with right down to the combat. It’s best played out in a pseudo-real-time manner in which you press the space bar after giving commands to your party, and then watch them go to it when you unpause the action.

Where Gorasul veers slightly away from the BG camp is in its use of 'special’ scenes, such as the one where you have to save a village from undead and you are tasked with strategically placing the villagers before battle, and then taking part in the battle itself. Another new concept is the inclusion of a weapon which levels up in the same way you do. You can even distribute experience points to your weapon and control how it develops as you play the game. These are both nice touches, and it has to be said that Gorasul deserves to succeed since the designers clearly put a lot of thought into keeping the game interesting over long periods of time. Sadly, the general impression you will get from Gorasulis less than favourable. This is why...

Crash!

There are several game-stopping bugs in the game. It’s not so bad since the release of the 1.04 patch (you can get this on the website listed on this page -make sure you get the English version) but some bugs do still remain. More annoying still are the many grammatical and spelling errors in the text throughout the game. You’re hardly likely to suspend your disbelief when reading conversational scripts that are badly translated from German, though they do provide the odd moment of hilarity in places where the interpreter completely misconstrued the original text and converted it into pure nonsense. Developers Silver Style say they are working on a patch to fix this - check on the website to see if they've done this before buying (as we go to press this patch has yet to materialise).

Graphically Gorasulis never going to win any awards. While visuals aren’t particularly important in an RPG, we have all been spoiled by the beautiful, crisp character and location graphics in BG2, and to settle for Gorasul washed out and dated graphic style is a bit much to ask of today’s discerning RPG buff. If you can overlook the dated graphics and comedy conversational text, there’s a good game to be found here. Just don’t go expecting BG2or you’re in for a big disappointment.