Perhaps the easiest way to describe this game is that it is the biggest and best made empty game I have ever played.
This game is huge (forPerhaps the easiest way to describe this game is that it is the biggest and best made empty game I have ever played.
This game is huge (for the time) and was very well designed. But where's the gameplay. There are huge sections with very little in them. Imagine building a lavish mansion and the only furniture is a couple chairs. That's what this game feels like. Combat is a joke since the only the weakest creatures are killable. Armor and weapons barely matter, they just make it easier to run away. However there are so laughably few enemies in the entire game, that you can skip almost all the combat if you wanted to, in fact most of the time it is preferable as you really want to avoid reloading (explain later.)
Most of the gameplay is platforming, and considering the fixed camera 2D overview of a 3D space, makes this mechanic painful as heck. It is so unforgiving and takes allot of trial and error for every jump. That's right, EVERY jump. Normally this isn't so bad, just save and reload right? That's right, except, both saving and loading take an insane amount of time. Duke Nukem Forever kind of bad! Considering how much you HAVE TO save, it will drive you insane. From start to finish you will spend at least 2 or 3 hours on load waiting screen (for a game with a 10 - 20 hour play time, that's ridiculous.)
But it does have a great story and good writing that do redeem it a bit. The magic in the game is also pretty cool, just a pity it isn't very practical outside of the story segments that introduce them.
Also, as I said earlier, while the game does feel very barren, what is there, looks great.
Overall:
Ultima 8 is miles behind what Ultima 7 was. True it has better visuals, but that's it. If the saving and loading times weren't so bad, I likely would have scored this a bit higher. I hope that 20 years later this has been fixed, but my memory of this game is forever tainted. At best, this was an unfinished game, that was too ambitious for what it wanted to be.… Expand