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The locale or "Gateway" is the northern Sword Coast far to the west of the first series [near the railway station - Ed]. Your characters start out with 3,000 experience points, which makes them level 2 characters for most classes. The maximum levels are 6 to 8, depending on the character class.

The game arrives on four disks with a C64 supplement, Adventurer's Journal and Rule Book. Naughty SSI have left an error within the C64 reference card (tsk, tsk). For those of you wishing to load in the pre-rolled party to have a quick nose around do not try to utilise the 'add character' option, with Disk C, in an attempt to load the characters as advised by the reference card. Instead, select 'load game', this will load the pre-rolled group.

As the game begins, your characters have been robbed of all but one small purse of gold while celebrating a successful job of guarding a caravan. They swear to find the thief and avenge themselves. After re-equipping as best they can, the party meets Krevish, who gets them a new commission. In the course of fulfilling this, they discover a threat to the Sword Coast from the Zhentarim. It's up to the party to foil this threat.

Gateway presents side missions to you, but gives no indication when a mission is complete. One example is the Neverwinter gardens. There are hints of missions that do not seem to be possible to complete (as in Llorkh).

Initially the battles are challenging, but once your characters get above level 3, combat becomes easy until the final confrontation. However, the mazes are tough. You have to go back to Pool Of Radiance to find mazes as tough as Gateway's, and the puzzles are equal to those in Secret Of The Silver Blades (except there is no Well of Knowledge to give you the answers).

The ending is problematic. It's possible to kill the main villain, but the end-game sequence ignores the fact thaat the party killed him. The final battle is based on an original idea that makes it interesting and challenging.

However, there is a very legitimate trick that permits an easy win. You can continue to play after end-game, but the overall situation doesn't change in any way. The side effects of the Zhentarim plot continue. This may be deliberate, as the overall plot of the series seems to be to foil a Zhentarim master plan which this quest makes only a small dent in.

Still, showing some effect of the defeat would have been more satisfying (e.g. the party could see increased commercial activity as they revisit the scenes of their adventure).

As with the previous gold box games, the user interface is a mixture of improvements and unimprovements. The Fix commands now also memorizes spells, but the automatic joining of items from Death Knights Of Krynn and the scroll bundles from Secret Of The Silver Blades is not available. The automatic spell memorizing does not allow you to memorize additional spells your characters get when they advance a level. A separate Memorize is still needed for that.

The artwork is the best yet in the gold box series. The giants, trolls, and ogres are not only more realistically sized, but are much more menacing-looking. There is one exception: the lizardmen look like pot-bellied lounge lizards rather than horrible monsters!

Copy protection is manual look-up which (finally!) is presented in the right order (page number, line number, with word number last). One major improvement in the copy protection is that the password is needed only the first time you start, instead of the previous random calls.

Overall, Gateway To The Savage Frontier is a decent RPG with a proven, if rather staid, design. However, a number of design imperfections prevent it from being as good as it should have been.

Presentation 70%
The interface is a bit of a mixed bag. Some improvements but a few let-downs.

Graphics 84%
Colourful graphics - much improved over previous games.

Hookability 71%
Tough gameplay during the maze sections can create some frustration.

Lastability 81%
Solid, familiar gameplay with a few black marks due to mission design.

Overall 78%
A solid RPG system which is nevertheless looking increasingly aged with each successive release.