Realms of Chaos (MS-DOS) - Guest Post

The title screen screams at you. Why? I don't know.

The swordsman, Endrick. He's 6 foot 5, his blood type is O- and his turn on is Chocolate.

The sorceress, Elandra. She's 5 foot 8, her blood type is Strawberries and her turn on is Poodles. Wait, no, that's not right.

So is this a Golden Axe-em up?

Not exactly, it's a platformer.

Your mission, whether you choose to accept it or not, is to roam the woodlands slicing giant cats warriors to ribbons with your longsword. He's got one of those special swords where he holds his hand backwards and the arc of the sword shoots out of his chest. There's a delay between pressing the button and him swinging it and you can't move and attack at the same time, so it's really difficult to attack moving enemies.

Where's Elandra, anyway?

SHAZAM!

Voila!

You can switch at any time by pressing Space, and you're reminded at the start of the level by some helpful and unintrusive tutorial text. Hooray!

She's a bit useless right now, because her fireball attack runs on gems and we've only got 4 of them right now. You can't do damage to the enemies by hitting them with the lightning strike either. What a crap sorceress.

She doesn't look like she's seven inches shorter than the guy.

These giant cats are lousy warriors... they don't attack you! You take contact damage off them which sends you flying, but you can just avoid them all if you want.

In addition to having to find ammo for the sorceress, getting hit by an enemy causes some of your collected gems to go flying everywhere like the rings from Sonic. (But they don't protect you like the rings do.)

I'm not really getting into this. The music is some quiet, inoffensive Adlib-powered foresty jungle clan music thing. I'm stomping forwards, hitting stuff (which explodes) and moving on and it's all very well put together and functional, but it's just not very interesting.

Instant death spike pits, moving platforms and plenty of hard to hit bats. A classic combination. When they hit you, you're knocked back through the air. Onto spikes. Without fail.

The second level is a even more difficult because this other type of cat warrior keeps jumping down from the treetops and throwing boleadoras at me. Can you guess what happened next?

I changed to Elandra in mid air, steered her back to safety and gave that rascally cat fireballs to the face! Ha-hah!

And then I mistimed the next jump and fell into the instant death spikes.

One somewhat long loading screen later...

I only bloody went and did it again. Back to the start of the level I go!

That platform at the top of the screen moves along the rope. Above it are the gems I need in order to shoot fireballs. Elandra's jump takes her quite high slowly, but her descent is very sudden and very fast. If you jump to get the gems, the platform moves away too fast to land back on it. Also, when you're not on the platform, it moves backwards.

I'm going to need every one of these infinite lives.

Collapsing floors, too. Why not.

Eek, it's a wolf!

Not some kind of bipedal wolf warrior either, just an ordinary wolf. Way more dangerous than the cats because he actively attacks you.

The level doesn't get any more interesting as it goes on and the treetop cats are becoming more and more frequent. As soon as I kill one, the next one appears. It doesn't end!

Different level, same old getting hit by bats and falling down instant death holes.

Enough is enough! I have had it with these holes!