Year:  1990

Developer:  Interplay Productions

Number of Players:  1-4

Some games from my childhood left a memorable impression on me.  Swords and Serpents is one of those games I remember very clearly from my youth.  This is a game that I tried to beat over and over again just to get frustrated with it or lose interest in before making any serious progress.  Fast forward thirty years, now as an adult I decided it was time to add this game to my beaten game list.  This time around though I brought my brother along for the ride and by the end we pretty much got what we expected from the game.

The is a first person dungeon crawler RPG that draws upon Dungeons and Dragons.  In Swords and Serpents you create a four player party whose goal is to slay a dragon.  You can pick from a warrior, a mage and a thief each of which has there own stat priorities.  From there you will explore sixteen different floors all the while fighting enemies, gaining gold to buy new weapons/armor, getting clues for later floors and leveling up to be strong enough to beat the final boss.  The game can be played solo, two players where each player controls two characters or with four players where each character is controlled by a player.

Everything in the game is done from a first person view from the movement to the combat.  Since there was two of us, we each took control of two characters in combat and even with two of us playing this game, the game can be hard. A lot of the time enemies can kill one of your characters before you get a chance to react.  The worst part was while the game remembers what you explored when going between floors, if you use a zoom tube (a quick way to travel between some levels), it blackens out what you already explored on the floor.  We used a guide to get through the game and it still took us around eleven hours to beat over multiple sittings. 

I can't overstate how important that guide was we used to get through this game.  I like games where you have to explore, level up and find new gear.  And I had that same joy when I started playing this game for the first three floors.  However, it also became obvious the farther we went into the game that without a guide, we would have been walking around lost and confused which would have probably lead to us dying much more that we did.  When I was younger I wouldn't have cared so much about wandering around, but now as an adult while I don't mind some exploring and having to figure it out, I don't have that kind of time.  Without a guide it easily would have taken another ten hours to beat this game.  Then again, that might have made the final boss easier on us.

This game didn't use a whole lot of graphics when you break everything down.  All the floors look the same except the color changes depending which one you are on.  You only run across maybe at most a dozen different kind of enemies with different color variations of most enemies depending which floor you were on.  I'm not saying anything looks bad, but there isn't a lot of variety.  The box art for the game was done by Boris Vallejo and looked really good.  My dad had a wall calendar with Boris's work on it and I remember the box art from that calendar.   The music isn't bad but I think there was only three or four different tracks in the game.  Sound effects are in the game but they are almost non existent. 

I am glad my brother and I went back through and beat this game.  The game is a decent D&D style RPG in the sense that there is a lot of exploring and having to figure out what is next.  While this is a complete game, I got the feeling that most of the content was put into the first two thirds of the game while the last third was pretty straightforward.  I also have to admit not having any healing item you could carry with you and only relying on your magic users to heal you did add some challenge to the game on top of everything else the game has you do.  The ending was pretty much what I expected but I am still glad I got to see it, even if it was thirty years after the fact.  If you are someone who likes old school RPGs this game might not have all the bells and whistles as other games, but it can still be fun if you have the time for it.