Ancient Domains of Mystery (ADOM)


Title		Ancient Domains of Mystery (ADOM)
Game Type	RPG
Players		1
Compatibility	All
Available	Aminet game/role/Adom_68020.lha   891K
Submission	Steven Pearson PG221902@stmail.staffs.ac.uk


Review
When I first downloaded this game I was hooked instantly. I had a quick flick
through the manual and I saw a keypress for Clean Ears. What kind of a game has
a key for Clean Ears.

Adom is set in a realm that is experienced an invasion from the hordes of chaos.
Good people are being corrupted and unless a hero can save them the world will
be destroyed. Typical story line, of course you could approach this from the
opposite direction. A hero could become strong and enter the realm of chaos to
become a new chaos god. This is an even harder task than saving the world and
to my knowledge has not yet been achieved although from all indications from
the games characters it should be possible.

Role-play games are by their nature difficult to get into, especially this
one. Adom has keys for everything from talking to people, swapping places with
neutral characters, praying to your God, Making a sacrifice, wiping your
Face and even 3 ways to pick something up.

Everything that this game can do is for a reason though, it's been born out of
years of beta testing with little extras bolted on over time. The game isn't the
chimera you'd imagine it to be though it's based around a brilliant basic
engine.

Nothing in this game is decided until you make it happen. Dungeons are
generated on the fly, and then remembered in case you ever return, You can drop
a single gold coin at the bottom of a dungeon and years later return to collect
it. The dungeon will look the same and until Monsters get the ability to pick
things up your coin will be waiting, but if you start another game the dungeons
are recreated anew, and everything is different.

There are a few stable elements in the game. The towns and villages are in about
the same place and always look the same. The quests you have to perform are
basically the same (and over the years ADOM has had many quests added to it).

The saved characters this game makes can get enormous though, One game I took
to near completion managed to reach over 10Mb of data, and from later adventures
I know that there are many places I had not visited the sheer magnitude of this
game is awesome.

The character generation is also excellent, you are assigned a star-sign (and a
birthday). Your star-sign affects your basic character so you should choose a
race and class that reflects this. Although you are free to do as you wish.

You very rarely get an out of class weak character. Certain classes are
supposed to be weak. The weak classes have their own rewards as at higher levels
they become very powerful and gain many unique skills.

The one stumbling block in getting started in Adom is that hundreds of your
characters will die. My high score table is full of failed characters some who
die within a few thousand turns, killed by a falling stone trap. Others have
ventured deep into the dungeon only to be wasted by a stupid greed to go
too deep in the dungeon too fast.

Adom has hundreds of creatures to fight, from rabid dogs to Black Unicorns and
everything in between. You maintain a memory of every creature you fight and can
use this information to help you decide whether you should risk an attack with
only half your health intact or run into the nearest room and lock the door
until you recover.

One of my favourite features are artifacts. These are extraordinary pieces of
equipment that may have belonged to ancient legendary heroes or forged from
basic pure chaos. Artifacts can possess many abilities like the boosting of
attributes or  granting immunities to elements, or just purely and simply being
ridiculously powerful!

Adom is a truly engrossing game you just have to be prepared to lose lot's of
characters you thought would make it but just failed due to plain bad luck.
(Which may not have even been your fault; your character could have been cursed
or doomed for some misdeeds he performed.)

If you can learn the controls, get to grips with the first few quests and not be
too put off by having to start the whole game again when a character dies you'll
have a brilliant time. Each time a character dies you should have learned
something new to help your next charcter until finally you can complete the
game, Which very few people have.

Oh yeah did I forget to mention the graphics are text based. Don't switch off.
this game isn't native to the Amiga it's available for the MS-DOS, and Intel
based Linux machines. We are incredibly lucky that the games authour knows an
Amiga owner who is willing to port the game. By text based I don't mean those
awful go north adventure games I mean the screen is generated from characters,
the dungeon is drawn on screen and you move around, it's just with characters
instead of graphics.

A brilliant game and we are really fortunate to be able to take part in the Adom
experience.






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