Ishar 3: The Seven Gates of Infinity

The Good
At first, everything! I played a demo of this before I finally managed to get my shaky little paws on it. The demo had a band of randomly created adventurers wandering around a deep lush forest. The armour they adorned was superbly crafted, they were bristling with blades and notched tools of bludgeoning. The forest was huge with towering trees and a canopy of green vegetation, the sun piercing the ceiling of leaves with golden shafts of purity. Birds called, insects whirred. We were set upon by a band of armored fiends, with haunting green orbs for eyes, a seemingly demented mage blinded my party and a titanic battle ensued. I was won over, I got the whole version and suddenly reality came crashing down on me.

The Bad
In my humble opinion, this game is truly awful. Truly. I don't even know where to begin. You start off in what seems to be some kind of city, which as you play you discover is actually a devious maze, really devious. I don't know how anyone could live in this place! All the houses are joined together, you can probably hear everything the neighbours say. Whats more the city is populated by cardboard cutouts depicting surreal images of...people. Which don't actually move, but seem rather to shift uncomfortably (and annoyingly) from toe to toe. Progressing through this nightmarish maze/city/playset was excruciating. After this the game just got amazingly worse, my favourite interaction with "Ishar 3" was deleting it from my hard drive.

The Bottom Line
I can't tell you how I would exactly describe it, because I don't think my review would be approved. So to keep it clean, trust me in 1994, they were capable of doing MUCH better. This review is only my own opinion, but from the look of things Silmarils never updated their engine, and just used the same tired formula again and again to finally produce something, very, very, bad.