Previous Next

Light and darkness are important things. They symbolise the continuing struggle between good and evil, day and night, peace and war and, er, being able to see or not. Shadoworlds is all about these struggles. You're surrounded by darkness and you have to, well, light it up. This is the sequel to Shadowlands, a fantasy role-playing game in the Dungeon Master mould, which got a rating of 84% in STF 33. Shadoworlds has a completely different plot and replaces the fantasy environment with a science-fiction "Alien-esque" one.

You've lost contact with your top-secret weapons research facility on Magna Six and things are beginning to look suspicious. Various computer terminals inform you that areas of the weapons facility have been infiltrated and alien life forms detected. You even come across a few hibernating aliens on your travels. But exactly what they're up to, and why, is for you to find out.

You have to use your ST's mouse to control a team of four futuristic soldiers, but this is not as easy as it first appears. It's OK when you're got a big pen room they can all find space in, but when you get to a narrow corridor or a doorway they all try to get through it at the same time. Similarly, if one of your characters gets stuck behind a door or well, the others have to shuffle back to get him - your strategic team formation rapidly descends into farcical bungling, like a scene from a Marx Brothers film. This is bad news when you're on the look out for a race of deadly aliens. Often it's quicker to move characters one at a time, but even that's not easy because it's practically impossible to tell them apart.

So what about the game? The shadow effects are superb, imparting a wonderful sense of creepiness; you find yourself peering into the darkness, wondering what is lurking there. You also get a real chill from the barrenness of the place - where is everybody? It's well spooky. There are two ways of lighting up the place. There are the battery-powered lamps in your helmet, which have a limited life-span, and the flares you find on your travels.

Stupidly, you enter the base completely unarmed, but as you walk around the rooms you find various weapons and objects you can use. The weapons systems are excellent - you start off with simple one-handed weapons like lightsabres and pistols, but later find two-handed weapons. These come in separate halves, which you can customise. For instance, you could take a laser and put it with a cannon for a laser cannon, or you could use the laser with an auto barrel to get rapid-fire laser shots.

Weapons are more or less effective, depending on what you're fighting. At the start you can get by with a pistol and a lightsabre, but the tougher robots need a good pasting from a laser cannon to get rid of them. Unfortunately, you have to get past one of them before you can get a laser cannon, so you have to be nimble too.

There are puzzles to solve on your way around; the lighting effects you use are the key to some of these and quite often you have to place objects on pressure pads, or turn off flares and lamps to open doors. None of this is helped by the robots firing at you from the darkness, and you have to do a bit of dodging before you find out where the blighter is.

Technically Shadoworlds is faultless. There's a real sense of atmosphere and the laser battles with hard-looking robots are great fun. However, the key to a good RPG is its addictiveness and this game doesn't measure up - it's more enticing than habit-forming and you certainly won't lose sleep over it. The gameplay can be annoyingly slow and it's irritating when you have to keep an eye on fluid levels, health and so on. You also need to save the game frequently, otherwise team members cop it while you're trying to do the puzzles. If it captures your imagination, go for it, but it doesn't go down as one of the all-time greats.