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King's Quest VIII: Mask of Eternity
Page 2
Inside the game
Connor, your characer in this adventure game can do lots of things. He can push many objects in order to get something or to enable a trap.
There are 3 different kinds of jumps that Connor can perform. Standing jump, running jump and the backflip. I personally never used the last jump because I don't think that Connor isn't really acrobatic enough to do that. :)
He can also conversate with many other characters throughout the game. They will give you helpful clues to solve future puzzles. Listen carefully and don't kill them.
Other items like potions, weapons, armor, ... can also be obtained by solving puzzles or by just exploring the level.
The main goal in King's Quest 8 is to find the six pieces of the broken Mask of Eternity and to return them to their rightful place.
If you want to succeed in your task you have to go through 7 different lands. The first land is 'The
Kingdom Of Daventry' and here it all started.
After that you'll enter 'The Dimension of Death' which is the holding place of souls that are awaiting judgment. If you get through that one alive then you have to face the other lands like 'The Swamp', 'The Underground Realm of the Gnomes', 'The Barren Region', 'The Frozen Reaches' and your final destination is 'The Realm of the Sun' where you'll have to fight with your biggest enemy, Lucreto.
 
Mask Of Eternity has many different monsters and some are really scary. Even to me :) Some are pretty good designed especially the Two-headed Dragon which is beautifully designed!
Each land has also its own monsters so you won't see a monster twice. Here are some monster-names: the Spriggan, Commander Skeleton (neat!), Wandering Spirit, Carnivorous Plant (Oh yes, they do exist), Fire Dwarf and many more.
Graphics, more of the same?
Graphically King's Quest VIII doesn't look outstanding but it doesn't look like crap either.
I was very pleased with the environmental graphics. The scenery and especially houses, cottages, castles, ... are very well scaled and they are visually very appealing. Connor himself is good animated, however there seems to be a shortage of polygons. All the characters, enemies included suffers from this polygon shortage but I have seen a lot worse in other games.
There isn't almost any facial animation and their faces look a bit 'too' flat to me.
As you might guess the eight King's Quest game has gone totally 3D. It makes use of 3D hardware acceleration and it supports Direct3D as well as 3DFX cards.
With my old but still powerful 'Monster 3D I' card the game looked sweet but it needs a lot of CPU horsepower. Mask Of Eternity still looks beautiful and if you switch to higher resolutions like 1024x768 I bet it looks great, even on a 19 inch monitor.
Sadly enough I couldn't test the game under Direct3D since it disables that mode when it detects a 3DFX system. :(
There are some good dynamic lighting effects and shadows involved here and I was very pleased that you can turn them all off in the setup menu if you want to speed up the performance of the game.
 
Great Speech!
Mask Of Eternity uses some great voice dialogues and they are all done with extreme quality. They don't sound lame at all and it provides the game with a greater adventure atmosphere. Sound effects are pretty good. I was surprised that my 16 bit Sound Blaster could handle them without losing any sound quality. Especially when you get into a fight, the sound that your sword or bow makes is superb.
Music is good too and it is played directly from the CD. It will gain in volume when you enter certain areas and that is a feature that I really like.
King's Quest weakest point
The weakest point of this King's Quest game might be its interface.
While the game gives the player total camera control it does have its weaknesses. When you want to change the camera angle of your hero, Connor you just need to hold down the right mouse button and then move forward/backward with your mouse to zoom in or zoom out. This may sound not frustrating at all but and especially in combat scenes it can be very frustrating because you have to act as quickly as possible to defeat the enemy but you can't find the right camera angle.
And if you rotate your mouse the camera angle will act as a mouse look. In some cases this look is very helpful but please don't rotate your mouse when you're in combat otherwise you sure gonna end up in the graveyard.
Another feature that some gamers will like is the option to change from 3rd person to a first person view. When you hit the 'F2' key, the default 3rd person view will automatically change to first person. I used it for a while and I found that it gave me more problems with those nasty camera angles then ever before. That's the reason while I just played the game in a 3rd person view. The best non-frustrating way to control Connor is by using your mouse and keyboard at the same time.
Oh yes, I already mentioned that the game needs a lot of CPU power and when you load a saved game, you better go take a leek and grab yourself a nice coffee because the loading times are pretty lengthy.
Conclusion
Designer and Sierra Co-founder Roberta Williams' is back with her eight King's Quest installment.
Now the game is entirely in 3D so you better have a 3D acceleration card ready. The scenery is good but nothing to get excited over. The atmosphere of this adventure game is superb so please enable sound effects and music because they kick ass!
You can control your character, Connor mainly with the mouse but the ability to change the different camera angles could have been a lot better. It may drive you crazy sometimes especially when you are in combat.
However it's real-time combat and after a while you get used to the several camera angles.
After all, King's Quest: Mask Of Eternity is a great adventure game. It may not be the best of the year but it's definitely in the Top 5.
-Bjorn
Ratings
Manual:
92% |
Graphics:
83% |
Music & Sfx:
88% |
GamePlay:
85% |
|
This game scores
on our 5-point Rating System
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