BRIEF: Paladin II (1992)

There we go with "version 1.0" again. I'd rather they lied to me and started at "version 2.3."

     

Paladin II

United States
Omnitrend Software (developer); Impressions Games (publisher)

Released 1993 for DOS, Amiga, and Atari ST

Rejected for: Insufficient character development

              

I investigated Omnitrend's Paladin (1988) back in 2011, won a couple of quests, and decided that while it was a decent squad-based strategy game, it wasn't enough of an RPG to meet my definitions. Thirteen years later, I make the same ruling about its sequel. In 2011, I numbered and scored it anyway, but I decline to do so now.

    

The first game had you in charge of a titular paladin, who despite his name was more like a mercenary. Some of the quests were a bit evil. Someone looked up the definition of the word between the two games, because in the sequel you play a "legendary hero, and a knight of great renown" with a specific mandate to "seek out and destroy evil and to defend and protect the weak." This is accomplished through a series of 20 independent quests with specific objectives and time limits: rescuing hostages, defeating bandits, slaying trolls, finding stolen property, defeating evil wizards, and so forth. The game even comes with a scenario builder so you can create your own.

         

Setting up the game. Creating a new paladin just involves choosing a name.

     

Playing each scenario is similar to being in permanent combat in a traditional RPG like the Gold Box games or Knights of Legend (1989). The party takes turns moving across a large map. Each character has a number of "movement points" that serve as an energy pool for walking, attacking, casting spells, and using items. You don't need to exhaust one character before moving on to the next--you can cycle freely among them. When you're done, you end the turn, and the enemy characters get to go.

       

Our goals for the mission.

      

The paladin and his allies have no permanent inventories, but they can find a variety of gear during the missions, including potions of healing, magic swords and shields, explosive crystals, Amulets of Levitation, and magic scrolls. 

         

An early scenario is called "Capture," and it asks you to wipe out a group of bandits led by a warlord named Kesrin and stop them from selling dangerous scrolls to an evil mage. You're joined on the quest by three swordsmen, a thief, a mage, and a ranger. It took me four tries to learn the controls and conventions well enough to win the scenario, and I found myself enjoying it by the end. It's very tactical, with considerations of character attributes, gear, terrain, facing direction, obstacles, traps, spells, and usable items. It has just the right amount of complexity, I think, although as with Knights of Legend, I wouldn't mind if the maps were smaller and it were a bit easier to find the enemies. 

     

My paladin (leftmost character) attacks an enemy from the side.

       

As with the original, timing seems to be everything. You definitely don't want to run up to enemies and then end the turn; that just gives them a free round of attacks. You need to engineer the opposite, or at least stage your characters so you can rush the enemy and attack a few times in the same round. Spells and some usable items are immensely powerful, but costly, so you have to save them for the right circumstances.

    

Finding the evil scrolls--and what looks like a demon.

      

I can report that the graphics and sound are a little better than the predecessor, although the game commits the common early-1990s sin of trying to depict too much with too few pixels. The characters are supposed to have cloaks and armbands and facial hair, but they just mostly look like blobs to me (my colorblindness undoubtedly plays a role). The controls are significantly improved, with redundant mouse/keyboard commands and options to turn off animations so you can get through the whole thing faster. You can move diagonally, unlike the original, but movement is still a little janky; it takes too long by keyboard, but the mouse just flat-out doesn't work a lot of the time, refusing to deposit characters where you try to drag them.

    

Available spells for the mage.

     

While I admire the tactics, the missions just seem awfully long. You spend a lot of time just mincing your way across the map; it perhaps would have been better if you could move the characters as a unit when not in combat, or at least set movement paths that they could automatically use from round to round, like in Warlords II.

    

The "paladin died" screen.

       

The characters have attributes--specifically, skill levels on "Melee," "Aiming," "Seeing," and "Detecting"-- and the game is almost an RPG in that these values can increase after a mission. But they can only increase for the paladin (the only permanent character), and only if he participates actively in the mission. When I won "Capture," my paladin's "Melee" and "Aiming" skills went up by 2% each. That technically passes my definition of an RPG, but my paladin started with "Melee" and "Aiming" values of 20%. He'd have to play 10 missions (and get rewarded for all of them) to even get to 40%. And that's just one character out of up to a dozen that you control in missions. Character development is thus not a primary feature of gameplay. It's a small bone to toss players without unbalancing the difficulty of the missions.

     

And the victory screen. Or else I'm shoving that wizard off a cliff.

        

Despite my rejection, I think it could be a fun game if you like tactical combat. Allen Greenberg gave it a positive review for that reason in the March 1993 Computer Gaming World. ("A paladin, of course, is an apprentice knight," he tells us. What?!) Dragon, on the other hand, in the same issue that gave five stars to Lemmings (1991), gave it only two stars, with criticisms towards the interface, speed of the game, and graphics. 

    

Connecticut-based Omnitrend specialized in strategy and simulation games, including the Universe series (1983/1986), the Breach series (1987/1990/1995) , and the Rules of Engagement series (1991/1993). The company is still around today, but they left game design in the mid-1990s to focus on communications software.