Ultima II: The Revenge of the Enchantress...

The Good
A lot of reviewers tend to look down on Ultima II as the black sheep of the series. But when you consider what was available at the time, its actually a pretty good advancement over the previous game. Improvements from the previous Ultima include :

Gigantic World - The game world is huge, the towns and dungeons are huge, and there are several time zones and planets to explore. Getting to those planets and some places in the time zones is a real challenge.

Faster Gameplay - Akalabeth and Ultima used Applesoft BASIC and Atari BASIC (for Ultima's 8-bit port to the Atari computers) for most, if not all of the games. Travel in Ultima was ridiculously slow, as you can literally see the screen refresh itself with every step. Dungeoneering is an exercise in frustration as the slow refresh rate leads to lost keystrokes and extra hits from the monsters. Everything feels faster.

More Detailed Graphics - While many of the tiles in this game were reused from the last one, the graphical level of quality has improved. Water is now animated, each character class has a unique icon, and overworld enemies have real shapes. Dungeon enemies now are shown in color instead of wireframe. The towns no longer are in a smaller perspective than the overworld.

A Sense of Direction - In the original Ultima, the player practically figure out what to do by spending hard earned gold at the taverns and figuring out to do quests from the Kings. The manual was very sparse, it did not even inform the player that there were multiple continents that needed to be explored. Nor did it identify that the object of the game was to defeat a bad guy. Ultima II gives the player a backstory and a cloth map with the time gates delineated.

More Lively World - In Ultima, you could only transact with Kings and Merchants. In Ultima II, you can actually talk to townspeople. While most can only spout a canned line, there are some in each town which can provide you a clue or some amusement. They also move around, except for guards (unless you kill someone in town).

Lack of Disk Swapping - In this game, you will not need to swap disks often. After the initial Program / Player swap, you will not swap again until you lift off from Earth.

Packaging - This is the first Ultima game to come in a box and a cloth map. The previous Ultima had come in a ziplock bag without a map. Unlike today's games which may include a cloth map, Ultima's maps are actually useful and necessary for gameplay.

The Bad
Bugs - This game has two very nasty bugs. One of which is that, in the original release versions for the Apple II, Atari 8-bit and IBM PC, it is impossible to raise your strength level. The second one is that your stats, like HP, Food and Gold, can "roll-over" if you earn more than 9999 in a stat. So if you have 9950 food and buy 50 more, you are dead.

Unforgiving Death - If you die in this game, the game will force you to restart. It writes your death to your player disk, forcing you to make another. You can die from lack of food, bad luck or failing to land your ship properly.

Lucky Items and Thieves - You can buy weapons and armor in this game, but all items, including useful ones, are randomly acquired upon defeating enemies in the overland. For example, one special item is a Blue Tassel, which you can use to board any pirate ship. You need to board pirate ships in this game. But if a thief randomly steals your Tassel, you cannot board another pirate ship unless you find one again.

Combat Inequality - It seems like, no matter what kind of weapons and armor you acquire, you can never really carve your way through even the weaker monsters like Orcs and Thieves.

Inability to Reset the Player Disk - On the Apple, Atari 8-bit and IBM versions, you had to create a new Player Disk each time you began a new game. There was no utility to reset the maps or the character, so if you mistakenly used your original Player Disk, you were out of luck if you saved to disk. The C64 version does include a reset utility.

The Bottom Line
Ultima II is quite an improvement over its predecessor, and it is only fair to judge the game against what else was available in 1982-1983 and its predecessor. To judge it against the Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness 1986 remake is not appropriate. It had little competition, as the second Wizardry scenario did not drastically improve on the first and the rest were Rogue-like games.

The Good
The concept of the Time Doors was fabulous - travelling through different eras to do battle was a wonderful idea. (Though it caused some gripes that I'll reveal below). And, of course, I love it because its part of Ultima.

The Bad
The above being said, it is my LEAST favourite Ultima.

The space motif remains present here. That just plain bites. And the victory requires you to travel to the mysterious "Planet X", though if its co-ordinates are revealed in the game, I couldn't find them. I just took a lucky guess and ended up there.

The use of the Time Doors required a world where we could relate to the passage of time. I.e. ours. That's right, Ultima II takes place on Earth. Interesting twist, but since I've never heard of rampaging orcs in Earth history, a little hard to swallow.

Although the Time Doors in concept were quite cool, each time was basically just a new map where you fought the same old monsters.

Finally - it has been all but impossible to find a working copy of this game. I own many copies of Ultima games for many reasons - stand alones on the Commodore, stand alones on the IBM and copies in the Ultima I - VI series and the Utlima Collection. In all these, the only functioning copy I have ever found of this game was in the most recent, Ultima Collection.

The Bottom Line
For those who are die hard Ultima fanatics like myself, the game is a must play. The Avatar killed Minax, and I think you should too, or you ain't no Avatar. But unless fictional titles for fictional deeds weigh as insanely heavily on you as they seem to me, Ultima II is the one I would most advocate steering clear of.

The Good
This is a much larger game than its predecessor. This time, towns are on scrolling maps, instead of the one screen, and there are numerous world maps to represent each time zone. Its also the first Ultima to feature moon-gates, although this time they take you through time as well as space. You can now talk to people in the towns, although you will just get a brief (and usually meaningless) one line response.

It was also the first Ultima to come in decent packaging with the obligatory cloth map. The over-sized box, map and manual are seriously impressive and a lot better than anything that comes with today's games.

The Bad
The game took place on Earth, which seems very out of place to an Ultima fan. It was necessary to give the time travel context but it doesn't fit in with the rest of the games.

The game was also extremely open ended, the quests of the last game have gone altogether. This can be a good thing but here it just made the game less fun. 95% of the time to complete this game was spent gathering experience and sailing round and round the time of legends island shooting monsters with my ships cannon. This sort of mindless grinding is something I dislike in RPG's. Getting a blue tassel (required to get a ship) also takes forever.

The dungeons in this game were basically pointless, I never went into one during the whole game. Its far easier to gain experience with a ship.

There's no story, and some very strange gameplay elements. Stats are raised by offering gold to a clerk at the Hotel California. Getting to key characters means butchering your way through innocent guards - this is definitely not the behaviour of the avatar of later games.

The Bottom Line
I couldn't honestly recommend to anyone that they bother playing this game. Its part of the Ultima series so I had to play it, but the game is a bit of a mess, doesn't advance the plot beyond what is in the manual and requires a reasonable amount of time to finish (maybe 5-6 hours).