Critic & User Reviews
IGN Review of Fighting Fantasy: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain
Right at about the 20% completion mark, right when you're really settling into the gameplay and getting into the flow of it all, Fighting Fantasy hits a wall. You enter a room and are instantly killed by the overpowered monsters inside. You think it's just a fluke, that you went the wrong way or something, so you reload from your save file and try a different path -- same result. A mass of monsters descends upon you, tearing you limb from limb. Fighting Fantasy is fun for the first hour or two you spend with it, but once it hits that wall you'll be nothing but frustrated every minute after that.
If you were around back in the '80s and were either an avid gamer or reader at the time, you might remember the Fighting Fantasy series of "gamebooks" created by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. Like a more complicated take on the "Choose Your Own Adventure" book series that was also popular in that same era, Fighting Fantasy offered a series of adventures in page-turning form -- you'd read a little bit, come to a decision-making point for your hero, and the book would tell you "turn to page 72 if you want to attack the dragon" or "turn to page 93 if you want to run away," for example.
Fighting Fantasy: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain is part of the new revival of that classic series, and aims to convert the storyline of the very first book in the franchise, "The Warlock of Firetop Mountain" from 1982, into interactive video game form on Nintendo's DS. And it does pretty well, in the beginning. It offers a first-person perspective RPG adventure with lots of hacking and slashing action, a 3D engine that's beautifully fluid at 60 frames per second and the same kind of old-school fantasy vibe that more modern games like The Elder Scrolls series have also been able to capitalize on.
There are a number of contributing factors -- the first is the number of enemies, and the fact that they don't stay dead after you kill them. I stumbled into a room overflowing with orcs and was nearly instantly dropped after just five seconds' worth of combat against their barrage of axe attacks. This wouldn't be so unfair, except that it happens so suddenly -- up to that point you never encounter more than one monster at a time, so you're certainly not prepared to make the leap from single combat to crowd control. I found success through a hit-and-run tactic of entering the room, taking a couple of quick swipes at the nearest guy, running back out the door and healing myself, then repeating that process until they were all eventually dead. But, after a few minutes of exploration elsewhere and being forced to backtrack to that same room, all those enemies returned -- along with newer, even more powerful foes.
And that's the second factor contributing to Fighting Fantasy's too-steep difficulty curve -- the individual abilities of enemies increase too quickly for you to counter. You go from bashing common rats in the head with a bone club to being shot from a hundred yards away with fireballs thrown by elemental ghosts in a matter of mere minutes -- there's no way you can keep up.
Especially because of the third factor, your character's own creepingly slow increase in abilities. At the beginning of Fighting Fantasy, you're given a questionnaire that assigns you a class of warrior, mage or rogue to start off with, or you can alternatively decide to customize your own class by picking and choosing from all available abilities and assigning stat points anywhere you like. I chose the latter, creating a melee-focused fighter with a bit of magical ability, so that I could rush into battle headfirst but also have access to healing spells to recover from those fights quickly.
And, if that weren't enough, many of the weapons and armor pieces you find are restricted to characters of higher stats -- so you'll often find equipment that could greatly help you even the odds, but you'll be unable to equip it until you've gained something like seven more levels.
Fighting Fantasy remains technically impressive all the while, as dashing through the twists and turns of Firetop's dungeons is presented with some of the tightest 3D work I've witnessed on the DS. The enemy characters are not quite as exciting, as they're all flat 2D sprites with some stilted animation. And your character, too, is locked into the same single attack motion again and again, when you dive into close-quarters combat against these flat-panel foes. But overall, the visuals work pretty well -- they're somewhat modern, somewhat old-school. A good match for this 2009 update of a 1982 story.
The game also adds in some subtle decision-making through dialogue trees and interactions with non-player characters that are certainly drawing from the branching paths offered in the original novel -- I encountered a vicious orc holding a key I needed, for example, and the game gave me the option of either reasoning with him or trying to intimidate him. I tried reason first, and he got offended, attacked me and killed me. I then reloaded from my save and tried the other option -- a show of verbal brute force. At this, he recoiled in terror and ran away, leaving me with the key I needed without having to fight to get it.
If you were around back in the '80s and were either an avid gamer or reader at the time, you might remember the Fighting Fantasy series of "gamebooks" created by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. Like a more complicated take on the "Choose Your Own Adventure" book series that was also popular in that same era, Fighting Fantasy offered a series of adventures in page-turning form -- you'd read a little bit, come to a decision-making point for your hero, and the book would tell you "turn to page 72 if you want to attack the dragon" or "turn to page 93 if you want to run away," for example.
Fighting Fantasy: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain is part of the new revival of that classic series, and aims to convert the storyline of the very first book in the franchise, "The Warlock of Firetop Mountain" from 1982, into interactive video game form on Nintendo's DS. And it does pretty well, in the beginning. It offers a first-person perspective RPG adventure with lots of hacking and slashing action, a 3D engine that's beautifully fluid at 60 frames per second and the same kind of old-school fantasy vibe that more modern games like The Elder Scrolls series have also been able to capitalize on.
There are a number of contributing factors -- the first is the number of enemies, and the fact that they don't stay dead after you kill them. I stumbled into a room overflowing with orcs and was nearly instantly dropped after just five seconds' worth of combat against their barrage of axe attacks. This wouldn't be so unfair, except that it happens so suddenly -- up to that point you never encounter more than one monster at a time, so you're certainly not prepared to make the leap from single combat to crowd control. I found success through a hit-and-run tactic of entering the room, taking a couple of quick swipes at the nearest guy, running back out the door and healing myself, then repeating that process until they were all eventually dead. But, after a few minutes of exploration elsewhere and being forced to backtrack to that same room, all those enemies returned -- along with newer, even more powerful foes.
And that's the second factor contributing to Fighting Fantasy's too-steep difficulty curve -- the individual abilities of enemies increase too quickly for you to counter. You go from bashing common rats in the head with a bone club to being shot from a hundred yards away with fireballs thrown by elemental ghosts in a matter of mere minutes -- there's no way you can keep up.
Especially because of the third factor, your character's own creepingly slow increase in abilities. At the beginning of Fighting Fantasy, you're given a questionnaire that assigns you a class of warrior, mage or rogue to start off with, or you can alternatively decide to customize your own class by picking and choosing from all available abilities and assigning stat points anywhere you like. I chose the latter, creating a melee-focused fighter with a bit of magical ability, so that I could rush into battle headfirst but also have access to healing spells to recover from those fights quickly.
And, if that weren't enough, many of the weapons and armor pieces you find are restricted to characters of higher stats -- so you'll often find equipment that could greatly help you even the odds, but you'll be unable to equip it until you've gained something like seven more levels.
Fighting Fantasy remains technically impressive all the while, as dashing through the twists and turns of Firetop's dungeons is presented with some of the tightest 3D work I've witnessed on the DS. The enemy characters are not quite as exciting, as they're all flat 2D sprites with some stilted animation. And your character, too, is locked into the same single attack motion again and again, when you dive into close-quarters combat against these flat-panel foes. But overall, the visuals work pretty well -- they're somewhat modern, somewhat old-school. A good match for this 2009 update of a 1982 story.
The game also adds in some subtle decision-making through dialogue trees and interactions with non-player characters that are certainly drawing from the branching paths offered in the original novel -- I encountered a vicious orc holding a key I needed, for example, and the game gave me the option of either reasoning with him or trying to intimidate him. I tried reason first, and he got offended, attacked me and killed me. I then reloaded from my save and tried the other option -- a show of verbal brute force. At this, he recoiled in terror and ran away, leaving me with the key I needed without having to fight to get it.
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