Amberstar
| Developer: Thalion | Graphics: |
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| Publisher: Thalion | Sound: |
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| Year: 1992 | Difficulty: |
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| Genre: Role-playing game | Lastability: |
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| Number of players: 1 | Rating: |
8/10 | |
You’re a naive youngster whose parents have just been done by orcs. Not knowing what to do, you decide to set off on a quest for thirteen fragments of a legendary artifact to defeat an evil god and save the world. Routine, routine…
This German game (translated into English but not French, to my knowledge) was developed on the Atari ST, like Dragonflight, from which it maintains the main characteristics: a gargantuan world to explore, a simple interface and a very traditional Tolkienesque plot, supported by copious dialogue. The display mode alternates between 2D top-down view (world map exploration, building visits) and first-person 3D (in towns, dungeons and combat mode).
If the story doesn’t bring a tear to your eye from the start, the music certainly will. For me, the game’s atmosphere owes everything to its soundtrack. Sadly, there are no sound effects, and after a few hours, our ears start to ring. The controls are easy to get to grips with. Nevertheless, one struggles at the beginning whilst our character is weak, and particularly, alone. Therefore, one must prompto set out in search of proper equipment and travel companions (you can recruit up to five).
Subsequently, the turn-based combat presents everything one might expect from a traditional role-playing game: tactical positioning, attack, defence, items, magic. However, it lacks a bit of variety and zest (sound effects, perhaps). At least the monsters have the courtesy not to appear randomly every ten metres…
Regarding nice touches, let’s applaud the presence of automatic mapping. There’s also a sort of fog on the screen (in top-down view) that masks areas outside the character’s field of vision. And at night, the visible area reduces to a small circle around their position.
To sum up, Amberstar is an outdated game, but one that retains a certain charm, primarily thanks to its music. However, I’m not sure the magic lasts very long, especially when one knows about its sequel, Ambermoon, which is rather more enticing…
Note that prior installation is necessary, either on a hard drive or three blank floppy disks (this avoided ruining the originals). Using a hard drive is far preferable if you don’t want to spend your time swapping diskettes, especially since, as is often the case, the second drive doesn’t seem to be supported.
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