The Dragon Sword

The Dragon Sword is a 1990 DOS role-playing game that makes no secret of its model: this is Wizardry through and through, built by two maths and physics students and distributed as shareware.

It opens with assembling a party of up to six adventurers. The races are exactly the ones you would expect — human, dwarf, elf, half-elf, hobbit and gnome — and the usual quartet of fighter, thief, cleric and magic user is joined by a barbarian and a monk. Attributes are rolled randomly, so it is worth re-rolling for a while before committing. From a town called Bralka you then descend into a dungeon of a formidable thirty levels, each one twenty-one by twenty-one squares.

Movement and combat are turn-based and seen in first person, with the world drawn in simple lines. In a fight only the front three characters can strike in melee; everyone enters an action and the whole round then resolves at once. Two departures from the template are worth noting. Spells do not use fixed slots but draw on a shared pool of points, which grants far more flexibility, and death is not final, since you can save anywhere — albeit into a single slot. There is also a likeable spell that summons a customisable companion.

Besides monsters, the levels hold puzzles and passwords hidden on other floors, so drawing maps on paper is a necessity rather than nostalgia. The scale is also the biggest weakness: thirty levels is a lot, and the game fills them through repetition rather than fresh ideas. The presentation is austere and the story essentially a pretext.

Anyone fond of old crawls who does not mind graph paper beside the keyboard gets a genuinely substantial piece of work. For everyone else it is very dry going. On oldgame.cz it runs straight in the browser.