Game 300: Citadel of Vras (1989)

A clear homage to Space Invaders?

           
Citadel of Vras
Australia

Independently developed; distributed by Megadisc

Released in 1989 for Amiga

Date Started: 5 August 2018

Citadel of Vras is a low-frills dungeon crawler inspired by The Bard's Tale for its mechanics and any number of science fiction books and television shows for its content. (These facts are relayed right on the copyright screen.) It does nothing particularly wrong, but it's the type of game that exposes all its secrets by the end of the first level, and all that's left is to repeat that experience eight more times in pursuit of what will almost certainly be a underwhelming "winning screen."

The characters are agents for the Galactic Federation of Planets, sent to the planet Vras to recover a Talisman of Truth before the pirate Sarkov and his evil band of Graids from the planet Saluté can get to it. The Talisman was left behind by an ancient species called the Old Ones, and it's apparently the key to the next step in the evolution of sentient races. The party assembles at a spaceport on Vras's moon, Nigris, and then assaults the 9-level citadel. All levels are 20 x 20 and all exploration is in first-person view.
          

The Nigris Spaceport serves as the main menu.

            

Five characters are created from six classes: Jedi knight, Arcturian giant, Horb ant warrior, Denk Mentat, Lamian Elfin, and Sirian Lizard-Man. I believe Arcturian giants are a reference to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Mentats come from Dune, but I'm not sure about the others (aside from Jedi, of course). It feels like Sirian Lizard-Men have been in a lot of things. Each has strengths and weaknesses in the seven attributes: weapon skill, intelligence, dexterity, constitution, luck, life force, and psychic energy.
         

Character creation. This Mentat does indeed look pretty Denk.

       
As the game begins, the characters have no weapons or psychic abilities, and their only armor is basic spacesuits--which you have to equip immediately to avoid taking damage every few turns. Enemies start attacking immediately, so you spend a lot of time reloading until you find the store and training center to get some entry level weapons and base-level psychic abilities.

After that, the game is a lot like The Bard's Tale with a sci-fi patina. You march through featureless hallways and burst through doors, fighting random combats with aliens and robots (including Daleks), in search of the two or three squares per level that have anything interesting. Vras is somewhat easier than its cousins in that a) you can save anywhere; b) the combats on the first level almost never offer more than one enemy; and c) both hit points and spell points regenerate as you walk around.

Combat follows the basic structure established in Wizardry and retained by the Interplay titles. When you first meet an enemy, you have options to greet, flee, or attack. When the first two fail, they give the enemy a free round, so they're not often good options.
          

Initial combat options.

         
If you attack, you specify an action for each character: attack, defend, or use a psychic ability. These actions execute all at once, in character order, at the end of the round. You watch the outcomes scroll by, designate a new set of actions at the end of the round, and so on until the enemy party is destroyed. You get experience, credits, and sometimes items from each slain enemy, equally distributed among party members.
        

Combat actions slowly scroll by.

         
The psychic abilities, which function like spells in a fantasy RPG, make things a little too easy because (at least on the first two levels) they never fail. The Denk Mentat has a Level 1 ability called "Illusions" that distracts all enemies for one combat round. Its cost is so low that you can usually cast it on every enemy party and kill them before they can recover, then recover those psychic points before the next combat. At Level 2, the Mentat gets "Sleep," which lasts even longer. The Jedi similarly gets "Freeze Foes" at Level 2 that amounts to the same thing.
          

Jedi powers alas do not include Force Lightning.

          
Physical attacks depend heavily on the weapon. At the beginning, you only have enough for staves, but soon you start finding weapons post-combat. Another source of treasure comes in the form of randomly-encountered lockers that you need some kind of tool to open. Pretty soon, characters are wielding needle guns, plasma axes, atomic lasers, blasters, and so forth. On Level 2, I found a weapon called a "neuronic whip" that damages all enemies in a party, not just one.
          

Lockers pop up randomly as you explore.

      
Other items found in the shop and abroad include various pieces of armor (tangle fields, repellor belts, carbal cloaks) and utilities like flashlights and sonic screwdrivers. There are a bunch of things whose use is unknown to me, like silver amulets and gold plates (they may just be for sale). Some enemy attacks damage spacesuits, so it's best to keep a few spares.
           

My inventory. A character can only hold 9 items.

            
When you level up, you get a boost to a random attribute, more hit points and psychic energy, and the ability to learn a new psychic ability. By the time I hit character Level 3, the monsters on the first two dungeon levels were trivially easy.
       

The game's version of the "review board."

       
In addition to its facilities, Level 1 had a couple of squares with messages. One said "...1 to here," echoed by a similar message reading "...3 to here" on the second level. They probably refer to some kind of teleportation schema I'll later discovered. Another message on Level 1 warned me to "beware the moonbeast!"
           

A message very much in keeping with the Bard's Tale roots.

          
Level 2 had less obvious structure than Level 1. It was dark, and flashlights run out pretty fast, so I had to load up before heading down. In one open area, I found the remains of a Jedi, along with a note that said an old man on the levels below knows something about coordinates. More important, the Jedi had a lightsaber, which I gave to my own Jedi. It works as both a weapon and a tool, but it only damages a single enemy.
           

In Star Wars, it wouldn't be something as pedestrian as a "tape recorder." It would have to have "holo" in the name.

         
A final message on Level 2 said, "Face a wall you don't want and use the gadget!" I figured this referred to an "unknown gadget" sold in the shop on Level 1 for 30,000 credits. Ladders are one-way, so I had to find the way back up to Level 1 before my flashlight inventory ran out. When I got there, I spent my accumulated money on the gadget, and sure enough, it destroys any wall you're facing--once. The gadget is destroyed in the process, which is a pretty hefty expense to remove a wall. Still, when I did it in front of a single enclosed square on Level 1, it led me to some kind of portal.

So far, the levels haven't offered any navigation obstacles like teleporters or spinners. They've mostly featured large, one-way sections, with a couple of basic nods to rhyme and reason in the macro structure of the corridors and rooms.
       

Level 1 of the Citadel of Vras.

         
The control scheme works well, supporting both mouse clicks and obvious keyboard commands. I'm avoiding the mouse because the jackasses that "cracked" the copy I found insisted in replacing the mouse cursor with the logo of their little club. They also might have messed with other aspects of the game. At one point, trying to load a saved game, I was instead taken to the "warez" screen with the message "naughty, naughty" for no reason that I could see. I'm going to have to rely mostly on save states for this one, but that's not really cheating because the game lets you save anywhere.

A couple of things make Vras slightly annoying beyond the fact that the game is a bit boring. First, random encounters (including enemies and lockers) don't trigger until you try to move out of a square. The graphics show you moving forward just before the enemy appears, but what really happens behind the scenes is that you get kicked back to the square you just left. This makes it easy to lose count of where you are when trying to map long corridors. Second, combat is slow. There's a speed setting, but even at the maximum setting, watching the actions crawl by is mildly torturous. I've tried speeding up the emulator, but nothing in WinUAE's settings seems to do the trick--I can't find anything akin to the "warp" mode of the C64 or Apple II emulators that I've come to love.

The developer, Sarva Engelhardt of Western Australia, has at least created a competent game here, but I suspect Levels 3-9 are just going to offer more of the same experience. Let's hope I'm wrong.

Time so far: 4 hours