RPG Lite?
Right, before we go any further, let’s just adjust the rose tinted specs and get a few things straight. First off, Dungeon Master was a whopper of a game and hugely complex with it. Sure, once you’d got the hang of it DM was a joy and thoroughly engrossing. But it was a right bast to get into and unless you were prepared to invest at least 3 or 4 hours of game time, you would be forgiven for just giving up and going off to play Gunship 2000 or Geoff Crammond’s Formula 1 Grand Prix.But with Orcs and Elves you’re presented with one of those games where you can take the cart out of the box, lob everything else in the bin and just start playing. I like a game that lets you do that. No trawling through a manual, just slot in the cart and get on with the fun.
But how Orcs and Elves achieves this is going to be something of a disappointment for the more seasoned RPG fan as the game has been dumbed down to some extent, pulling some of the key features that make an RPG what it is. For example, the whole ‘role playing’ part of RPG is gone and replaced by an arbitrary system whereby you earn XP but don’t get to choose how to spend any points… in fact there aren’t any points to spend.
And, like it or not, you’re one character, an Elf who is tasked with aiding a Dwarven king. But when you arrive at his mountain residence all you find is death and bad guys and a few ghostly dwarven warriors. So it’s up to you and your talking wand to work your way through the mountain, battling the monster that have taken residence there in your quest to find the king and offer your aid.
So that’s the gumph out of the way, how does Orcs and Elves play?
The most notable trait of Orcs and Elves is that it’s a turn based RPG with actions such as movement, fighting, swigging potions etc all taking up one turn. At first this feels somewhat cumbersome but once you realise that switching weapons or turning on the spot don’t take up a turn, you’ll feel much happier and be better able to fight off the mass of monsters lurking in the mountain’s halls.
