Celtic Tales: Balor of the Evil Eye from Koei is one of those games that I run across every now and then that makes me feel like a 3-year-old, because I'm asking "why" every 10 seconds. Why does it look like that? Why does it play like that? Why do I feel like I'm playing Nintendo on my $3,000 computer? Why did Koei publish it like that? Why am I playing this when Blossom is on TV?
Celtic Tales is a role-playing game set way-back-when in Ireland. Characters from Celtic mythology are involved in a fight to keep the island of Eire from the evil clutches of Balor. The player is the leader of a tribe and must use diplomatic and military means to increase his tribe's power across the island. This means taking over or recruiting all of the other tribes. When the tribe is strong enough, the player is named high ruler of Eire, which really irritates Balor. A rumble between the player and Balor's hordes then breaks out in which the fate of the entire civilized world is determined. While not the most original gaming concept, it had potential - heavy accent on the word "had."
The game screen is an isometric square of the province you're giving commands to. It's the same style as SimCity 2000, except that it doesn't look nearly as good, and you can't scroll around the world. Each province has a Citadel where all leadership decisions are made; a Burg from where you take care of provincial matters like trading and creating objects; and a hero tent where heroes passing through can be questioned or recruited. Each province also has a forest, rocks, land which you can farm and a cow, which is representative of all your cattle. The player starts off with a number of heroes which are given assignments for the entire month like farming, training, mining, cutting wood, herding cattle, resting, exploring other provinces and so on. Each hero is classified as a warrior, druid or bard, and assigned attributes like strength, charm, and stamina.
The main problem of Celtic Tales is that the game plays very slowly. It's not so much that it takes the computer a lot of time to think, but it seems like it takes forever to actually accomplish anything. There just isn't enough different stuff going on to keep your interest. Sure, there are things to do, like exploring, farming, foresting and mining, but month after month after month it's the same old same old. The only real excitement happens in battle, which isn't much better. When one character attacks the other, their portraits are shown at the top of the screen with their respective strengths. The strengths then just start decreasing as the battle is fought. There's absolutely no interaction in how the battle proceeds, you just watch as the numbers change. And it's not just battle, everything in Celtic Tales is totally lackluster. It's just plain vanilla boring.
The interface is one thing that Celtic Tales has going for it. Everything is accomplished through a very easy point-and-click system. A character is simply clicked on, then given an assignment through clicking on a tool bar with all of the choices. If you're assigning an amount of grain to trade, a set of wheels with numbers on them pops up and you click the wheels to the amount that you want. If nothing else, it's an easy game to play.
Celtic Tales does actually do another thing really well: it makes you feel like you've actually gone into the past. It accomplishes this because the game looks and plays like a game from about five years ago - instant time travel. This is a game that comes on CD-ROM, so you'd think it probably has digitized video, voiceovers from actual actors, and at least 256-color VGA resolution, right? Well, what were you thinking? No voices, no video, and the game runs in 16 colors. No, that's not a misprint, 16 colors. What resolution is that - CGA, EGA? EGA I believe - It's been so long since I've seen it I forgot what it's called. There are more colors in my niece's box of crayons.
Keeping with the feel of time traveling, when the characters interact, a menu pops up which says the exact same thing almost every single time. For example, if an ambassador comes from a visiting tribe, your advisor shows up on your screen (in 16 glorious colors, mind you), saying the exact same old words with the same old menu with the same old choices as he did the last time someone showed up with tribute. Have you ever played one of those "choose your own adventure" books in which your choices are presented on a page? That's the same way this feels - like it's written on a page. The only changes are the character portraits and names and the amounts and type of commodities. It wouldn't be so bad if you were just presented with the situation and choices, but when the character shows up, they'll say something like "I'm glad we can be friends!" Well, the next time someone shows up, regardless of who the person is, if they're happy to be your friends, the quote is "I'm glad we can be friends!" each and every time.
There's some other stuff that's going on in Celtic Tales, but none of it is really worth talking about. This game is about the slowest, most unimpressive thing I've played in a long, long time. It's a real shame too, because I can tell that the role-playing portion was decently designed, but the implementation stinks. It plays like an old Nintendo or Commodore 64 game from years ago. I'm left asking myself why would they release something like this that might go on the same store shelf as Master of Magic, any of the Ultima titles, Civilization, or Master of Orion? It's too bad that we can't censor what software gets sold.
