Dragon Lore: The Legend Begins

The Good
For its time, it had excellent graphics, that everyone can agree on. The music is of high quality too, considering it was released in 1994. This became a trademark by Cryo since all their graphic adventures would employ quality graphics and music.

The Bad
There's so much about this game that feels wrong. Animation is very poor at best. Navigating the world is a slow and painful process. Puzzles are pretty simplistic yet you often get stuck because of the poor way of navigating and it's easy to pass by important places and objects or to even get lost!

The Bottom Line
This game really was like a blueprint for all future Cryo games. Weak puzzles, poor stories, graphics that look good but are badly animated, poor speech, etc. etc. I really can't recommend it because it is an example of everything a game shouldn't do. You can't sell games with great graphics alone! When Cryo moved away from great games like Dune and Megarace towards these bland adventure games, they really started to dig their own grave and in the end, they went bankrupt because they didn't evolve and stuck with their old formula that was never any good in the first place!

The Good
Dragon Lore creates precise feeling that characters you meet have life of its own, despite perhaps dated and poor AI that some would laugh at now. Graphics are simply brilliant and do not look bad even at this point.

The Bad
Some voices occasionly may sound cheesy, but then again a lot of modern games suffer from the same syndrome. Music is pretty good but gets repetitive with time. Puzzles somewhat simple, though it might make it appeal to the beginners of adventure genre.

The Bottom Line
One of the few adventure games I loved (outside of big titles), somewhat underrated and mislabeled by others who tried to put label on it. This game is hardly RPG and much more of adventure, since character management is not that difficult but adventures elements shine strong through the game. At few points it might actually become scary experience, though I would not want to spoil much. Highly recommended to any adventure die-hard fan.