First of all, I can't be arsed to take screenshots this time. Sorry.

Anyway, Heroes of the Lance. A most triumphant game, in that sort of not-very-good way. Much has been said about it, and here... more will be said. I guess.

So let's do this thing. Technically this is supposed to be a Dungeons and Dragons game, but it doesn't seem to matter much. Maybe there are saving throws in it or something.

I'll skip talking about the title screen since I don't care about it. When you start the game, you appear next to a pit, which presumably you can fall into and die. You have eight characters, each more generic than the last, and all rendered almost entirely in shades of pink and red.

You can switch characters, use spells, pick up items and do a bunch of other stuff via the menu, which is accessed by pressing select. Now, this sort of menu would work fine in a slow-paced text adventure or similar sort of game, but it's not really ideal for an action game, in which it would be nice to be able to pick up items quickly.

It would also be nice to be able to use spells during a fight without having to access the menu every time. But I guess it doesn't matter much, since the combat system is bad and terrible anyway.

Take, for instance, the fact that you can't attack unless you're pressing a direction button and the attack button at the same time. Why? That's dumb.

As you walk around the bland, featureless dungeon-esque area, you'll quickly realise that there's no way to tell where the crap you are. The hallways, paved with various exciting shades of grey, all look identical. Very identical.

It takes a while to go through doors, too. Maybe they're just stubborn doors. They might be unhappy because they're in a crap game. Or something.

Watch out for the angry, invincible dwarves who kick you in the shins repeatedly. Okay, so they're not really invincible. You just need to hold the down directional button and possibly forward at the same time while attacking to hit them. They still tend to kill your dudes though.

Then there are the green, winged demon things that spit magic at you. Those are annoying. It doesn't help that your attacks only occasionally bother to hit anything, either.

Maybe that's supposed to represent the enemy's armour class and the random chance to hit or something. But if they were going to have attacks that have a chance to randomly miss, they should've made it an RPG.

And that leads back to the whole thing about this game being based on Dungeons and Dragons. In which there are dice. And dice are awesome. This game suffers from a lack of dice, which can only possibly be described as "depressing". Maybe later on you get a 12-sided die that shoots lasers as a weapon. That might actually redeem this game a little bit.

And now one of those three characters has just fallen down a pit. Bah.

On another note, you can only jump when you're running at the same time. That's pretty dumb, guys.

Okay, I've blathered enough. Time to get down to the only part of a game review (I guess this is sort of a review...) that anyone ever seems to read: the arbitrarily-assigned numerical scores. Which I didn't do last time, but still.

Gameplay: 2
Naff at best. Not much fun, and you can hardly tell where the hell you're going. The combat system is terrible and the game in general lacks any real element of non-crapness.

Graphics: C.5
Grey. And repetitive.

Dwarves that kick you in the shins: 7
There are a fair number, although there could perhaps have been more.

Crapness: 9.129285726
Most triumphant! This game revolutionises the concept of crap. Sort of.

Ceilings: 4.527242215
Pretty flimsy and unstable, pieces of them fall on your characters rather often. Ceiling inspectors should probably be called in to examince them.

Psychological damage: 6
Middling levels of psychological damage may occur from playing this game.

You'll like it if you like...
Crap games.

Final word
It isn't that good.