Eye of the Beholder

Eye of the Beholder

 

Here’s the thing about bad games, they aren’t all necessarily bad.

 

Wait, what?  Did I just type that?  It may sound like it doesn’t make sense, but its true.  A lot of different things can make a game good or bad and not everyone agrees on what is most important.  Sometimes games are bad overall, other times they have one glaring flaw.  Add in the fact that rating games is as subjective as it is objective and you can see what I mean.

 

Eye of the Beholder should be a good game.  It has good graphics, solid sound and an interesting premise.  You build out a team of four characters to take on a sewer full of baddies on a mission to destroy the city. It’s a Dungeons & Dragons game, so it follows the rules of that universe.  I have never been a huge D&D fan, but it’s still nice to see. 

 

It’s a unique game unlike anything else on the SNES.  It’s difficult to describe, but anyone who has played the Might and Magic games on the PC will find the gameplay instantly familiar.  In fact, this is the port of a DOS game from 1991 (the SNES version came out in 1994).  

 

And therein lies the problem.  This thing is NOT built for an SNES controller.  It just isn’t.  For all of the functionality it has, it can’t compare to a keyboard and mouse.  This probably wasn’t the best game to review, because its really, really difficult to explain.  Long story short, just about every action, from using items to equipping weapons to attacking requires multiple button presses.  Because there are so few buttons on the controller, everything requires those buttons to be pressed in the correct order.  It gets old fast.   

 

Moving around the sewer is fine, but combat is damn near impossible. You will find yourself fumbling with the controller, accidentally bringing up your inventory or turning around while low level goblins whittle away your health.  Of all the games I have played through since I started this project, this is the first one I didn’t finish.

 

And its a shame because there is a lot going for it.  I have always love the D & D character customization system.  The graphics are good for their time and at the time, it was rare to see a first person RPG on consoles (hard to believe, isn’t it).  This isn’t bad like Days of Thunder, which is a lazy, POS cash grab.  That said, the controls made it essentially unplayable.  Maybe this would have been acceptable on the SNES early in its life cycle, but by 1994 there were already tons of console RPGs that were better.   If you are a hardcore D&D fan or you really love games like this, stick to the DOS version.  I might actually try and dig it up some day.  But on SNES, avoid, avoid, avoid.

 

2/10

 

Play this if:

You can actually figure out the controls

You are that hardcore of a D&D fan.  

You absolutely want to give it a try and can’t find it on PC

 

Avoid if:

You have access to a better version of the game

You prefer control schemes that aren’t rocket surgery