World of Aden: Thunderscape (DOS) - Longplay Part 4 of 4 - No Commentary

The playlist for the full longplay can be found here:
   • World of Aden: Thunderscape (DOS) - Longpl...  

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Here's part 4 of my blind longplay of the 1995 DOS game Thunderscape by SSI. This is the GOG version of the game. This is the first game in the set of two games that take place in the World of Aden setting. This is a game that I remember seeing advertisements for in game magazines of the time, but I never saw it in any of the local stores. I always figured this was a real time FPS RPG instead of having turn based combat like it does. I went through the majority of the game without looking things up, but there were several points during the playthrough that I looked at a text walkthrough of the game for certain puzzles, particularly about 2/3 to 3/4 of the way through. I play through the game with the default characters rather than using the character creator.

This game had a lot of promise at the start, but it's got a lot of problems that detract from the overall experience. For starters, the ability to look up and down works really weird and is generally useless. I ended up playing 98% of the game while crouching so I could see and grab items from the ground easier since it's really hard to do it from a standing position. Combat devolves into what I'll call a cacophony of noise ranging from the mildly amusing grunts of orcs to the nails-on-a-chalkboard shrieking of floating brains that makes me intensely hate whoever their sound designer was. I did discover a few hours in that mashing the mouse button speeds up combat quite a bit thankfully. There's numerous types of attack moves you can do. I ended up just rolling with Berserk Attack for everyone after a while since any other attack seems to miss 90% of the time. It was a little frustrating trying to use the thief's ability to hide, then backstab, only to find out that the hide move fails most of the time followed by the backstab move being able to also miss, which just wastes a ton of turns. The feint move is somewhat useful in the start since it increases the other characters chance to hit. Ranged attacks were largely a waste of time with minor exceptions. There's a lot of skills for your characters to get through level ups, but several of them seem to be utterly useless, Merchant standing out the most among them. I expected to run across numerous shops throughout the game. It turns out there are exactly 2 stores. The first store is right at the start of the game and sells mostly junk items you'll find almost immediately. The second store is a little over halfway through the game and also sells junk. The only point to the store is to identify weapons, armor, and items you've collected that aren't in the manual so you can tell what their stats are. There's quite a few puzzles in the game and a number of the riddle based ones have somewhat obtuse solutions where you need to click an item on something in the world that you wouldn't necessarily realize you should even do in the first place. They start getting kind of heavy handed with the brute force switch and button puzzles late in the game, I wasn't a fan of that. The worst things I ran into were a bugged out door on floor 16 that softlocked the game and a ceiling trap that blocked a required pathway on floor 19 that also softlocked the game (unless there happened to be a switch somewhere to reset it, which I never found). I was at least able to find a random forum post that described how to reset a floor in your save or I would have had to either restart the game or just give up at that point. PSA that the X key on the keyboard will instantly quit the game with no prompts at all, that was an upsetting discovery and accident several times. The respawn rates for the monsters were a bit high in my opinion. That did lead to not having to grind for levels and I felt pretty OP by the end fight. The story was pretty decent with tons of lore scattered around. Overall it was an enjoyable playthrough. I was definitely ready for it to be over by the end.

0:00:00 Resume Level 19 - Radiant Citadel Main Level (floor has just been reset)
2:12:33 Level 20 - Radiant Citadel Upper Level (enjoy the soothing combat sounds)
4:25:49 Level 21 - Radiant Citadel Roof
4:32:06 Level 21 - Final battle against Anthrax
4:47:49 Ending cutscene and credits