Secrets of the Silver Blades Review

My very first review was Champions of Krynn. My second Gold Box review and fourth review is Pool of…. Secret of the Silver Blades!

Secret of the Silver Blades is playable for those who love Dungeons and Dragons and for those who want to experience notable CRPGs of the past. It is an ok game made in the great Gold Box engine. While it is showing its age now and lacks replayability it is still a must play for the student of RPG history.

Why Secret of the Silver Blades instead of Pool of Radiance? I got SotSB first, and it was the first Gold Box game I got set in the Forgotten Realms universe.

I’ve played a lot of other games in Faerun since then, but this was the first one for me. While PoR gets more accolades and in most ways is a much better game, the mid-level campaign of SotSB was a natural progression for someone who had recently finished Champions of Krynn with characters around levels 7-9.

Before I begin I should probably remind you of my crpg game review criteria, which explains my methodology.

My Secrets of the Silver Blades Party

When I original got the game, I had read the manual by the time I got home from the mall and had a general idea of the party I would make. I cannot remember any of its composition but I’m sure it is not one that I would make today.

Based on my current preferences I decided to make a party that would reflect how I would play today, under the limitations of the old AD&D 2E ruleset.

I knew I wanted to make at least 2 non-human characters, but the older AD&D really penalizes them so I had to choose carefully. My first non-human was Brunn Ironfirst, a Dwarven Fighter.

Here’s an overview of the party I took through the game to do this review:

Raesa started out as a 5/6 Cleric/Mage with 101,250 experience and Joshua Kalis started out as a level 8 Cleric with 202,750 experience. I wanted to see which character is better at the beginning of the game, in the middle and at the end. The plan was for Joshua to dual class to a Magic User at Level 9.

Brother Haines and Kuros are fighters and plan on dual classing to Cleric and Thief once they reach level 13 and get two attacks per round. This is the party I plan to take into Pools of Darkness later on.

And here’s what a character screen looks like:

Now on to the review.

The CRPG System

To me as always “The CRPG System Matters”, one of the reasons why it gets 20 points allocated to it instead of 10.

Gold Box games use a limited version Advanced Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying game system ported over to computer use. You can read about the differences between versions of DnD here.

Here are the main points that stand out to me about Secret of the Silver Blades AD&D implementation compared to other Gold Box Games:

• Dual classing comes into its own with the mid-level experience cap in this game
• Like most of the Forgotten Realms games non-humans are extremely limited in that they can only go to certain levels
• This game’s CRPG strong point is the number of monsters implemented, including their special attacks. It is much higher than previous games
• Spell selection per level is extremly limited, mostly you only have available combat direct damage spells. Level 6 spells for clerics are limited to Harm and Heal
• There are many magical items. In other Gold Box games the magic item selection is much less compared to modern games, which is a strength. In SotSB, this strength is somewhat missing

Compared to the Dragonlance games like Champions of Krynn this game was a step back in terms of the system even though the level limit was higher.

Verdict: 10 / 20

Gameplay

There are two core gameplay elements in SotSB: walking/exploring and fighting.

There are so many random combats in this game, it becomes a huge turn-off later on. And the amount of walking around you have to do from one location to another adds up quickly, especially for those who are pampered with modern rpgs.

But if you are prepared to overlook those two flaws, the game becomes more bearable.

Since you spend so much time in combat we should take a look at how combat works in the game.

SotSB uses the standard Gold Box tactical combat engine. As mentioned previously there are many types of monsters, each with their own tactical challenges. The game is not too high level that direct damage magic completely loses its effectiveness but paralyzing enemies and then one-shotting them remains a very effective way to kill dangerous monsters.

Backstab damage is also very effective at higher levels but takes some maneuvering. I would really like to see a well done modern version of the Gold Box combat engine compared to all the real-time Darklands-style knock-offs we have now.

Verdict: 12 / 20

Fun Factor

Here’s the opening screen of the game:

Fun is incredibly subjective but important in games. After going through Champions of Krynn this game was much more of a slog. I had to really try to keep interested in the game and would often take breaks to do more interesting things.

Having said that here are some of the things that stood out as I played:

• The maze outside of town was a good spot for early grinding to level up my characters. The occassional random magic item didn’t hurt either
• The plot was nothing special, and I wanted to finish the game more to finish my review than for the purpose of finishing it for fun
• The mine section was extremely tedious, I was so happy to finish that section so I could go somewhere else

This is probably a game that will only appeal to those doing the entire FR Gold Box walkthrough as well as those who want to experience the entire history of CRPG games. It does not offer enough fun factor by itself.

Verdict: 5 / 10

Re-playability

I had played this game twice as a teenager so this was my third time through Secrets.

Here are my thoughts on having to play this game again:

• I was super amped when I started because I remember lots of randomness in the game
• After 30 minutes my enthusiasm slowly started to drain
• Two hours in and I needed to take a break for a few days before I wanted to start playing again

This game is not very re-playable. Those who want to totally complete the FR series will do so.

Verdict: 2 / 10

User Interface

SotSB had the standard user interface for Gold Box games, it just doesn’t compare to newer games.

Verdict: 4 / 10

Story

As is the case with other older RPGs the story is not that involved. It is mainly a hack-and-slash experience.

There is a little mystery at the beginning while you are getting introduced to the characters and the situation they are in but then it becomes a standard jump through a whole bunch of hoops so that you can get to the final boss and kill him style plot.

Verdict: 3 / 10

Modability

Modding wasn’t a huge thing back then and it shows with SotSB. You can edit your save games but you can’t add or create content easily.

This is one area where the game’s age shows.

Verdict: 1 / 10

Graphics & Sound

Graphics are not my main priority. But with older games like this it is harder to get drawn into the world with the older graphics.

Luckily for this game, music and sound play a subtle but powerful role in bringing the gamer into the game world.

Secrets has a few graphical improvements over some of the old games but it still shows its age.

The music in this game was pretty good for that time… the sounds, well once you’ve heard one of the hokey death screams, you probably won’t want to hear another ever again.

Verdict: 4 / 10

Design Lessons

Based on the above observations, I think I can draw a few design considerations:

1. Random areas are good, but there should be a point to them
2. Having modern journaling systems and mapping systems would have made the experience much more enjoyable. It was really hard to find out where you were sometimes
3. A game like this could have really been helped by making it more moddable

Now that we’ve reviewed the game and drawn some lessons from its design failures and triumphs we can recap.

Rating & Final Impressions

Here are all the scores listed together:

Final Verdict: Not as good as I remembered but not the worst game either. I’ll keep my happier memories of this game instead of my more recent experience with it.

Now I turn it over to you. What do you think? Did I get the scoring right? Where would you rank this game among Gold Box games?