Drakkhen

MS-DOS had its good moments and this isn't one of them. I'm sure the game is perfectly playable, at least for 1989. I've played the Atari version and the Super Nintendo version, which were taken by some as a great game in the time, but this version is pretty bad, even considering its release date. When you start it up, you can create your characters which is a lot of fun, set up your color and sound settings, and bam. You're in Drakkhen. You're totally screwed.

Gameplay: 2/10
Drakkhen is a 3D RPG sort of thing. You wander freely around a world filled with grass, sky, water, trees, and buildings. Every now and then you'll get a monster that comes and starts to whoop your ass. This is where the battle sequence begins, and your four characters of choice will stumble onto the screen and start taking damage. You're somehow supposed to control all four of these guys by switching between them and choosing who's going to attack what, all in real time. At first, I couldn't figure out how to switch them, or how to do much of anything for that matter. Eventually I learned you had to click to attack mode first, and use each character to attack the monster. After getting my ass handed to me a few times and restarting the game, I finally beat some sort of blue snake thing and was fairly proud. Just at that moment, the game asked me the most unreasonable question for that point and time: DRAKKHEN CODES. LINE 11. WORD 1. What the hell, you want me to prove that I bought the game by looking through a manual to get a series of passwords? -8 points.

Graphics: 10/10
For the time, the graphics are good. There's a lot of animation going on, everything is colorful and detectable, and you're moving around a world in first person. I don't have any problems with how the game looks. The cover art is pretty sweet and the overall presentation is good. Too bad the game can't play as super as it looks.

Sound: 5/10
Drakkhen does a pretty good job with what they have. There's some music and some sword noises and stuff. But it's so, so annoying. The enemies that are constantly attacking you are playing a sound over and over and eventually it just turns to a grinding. -5 points for annoying me when you were doing a good job at not.

Overall: 3/10
I've known about this game for a long time and have never really found myself playing it for more than five minutes. This is probably due to the loose click combat system that only allows you to get beat up easily. You'll also bump into trees a lot, unfortunately, that's the most entertaining part of Drakkhen. It's a shame, too, because the game looks so good on the outside, but when you really get in to it, it's like a one-way trip to bad videogame town. It's free, but you won't get far, thanks to the archaic anti-piracy system. Oh, I forgot to mention, if you don't enter the DRAKKHEN CODE, the game restarts. Damn.
http://www.bestclassicdosgames.com/download/drakkhen.htm