Posted June 16, 2020
Blackthorne (DOS). Basically Prince of Persia but totally metal. You control a Snake Pliskin-looking guy armed with a shotgun who's warped back to his long-lost home planet/dimension to liberate it from an overlord who seems like Blizzard's rough draft version of Diablo and his orc horde. I certainly have no complaints about this. The game has a great pulpy atmosphere.
You have a simple inventory that's mostly handy for picking up keys to unlock forcefields and extend bridges, along with bombs and health potions. The gunfighting is done by ducking into the background and then popping out to hit your enemy before he can take cover, too. What this does to the gameplay is that it turns combat into an exercise in patience and timing. The less antsy you are to just get a fight over with, the more likely you'll be to come out of it with a good amount of health. Things do get easier toward the end of the game, when your gun is upgraded, but then the game is also throwing more enemies at you in more challenging circumstances. As far as everything else goes, it really does play a lot like PoP, and like that game, my biggest challenge was mastering the timing of the running long jump.
I never did find a use for the no-look behind-the-back shooting method. It's just something that looks cool, I guess. I seem to recall that the SNES version allows you to actually free your friends from their chains but for some reason that's not in the DOS version. Using this freeware version downloaded from Blizzard's site, I found it to have a nasty bug - I'm not sure if it's always been there - that can cause inventory items to vanish if you aren't careful about highlighting the right item before unlocking a door. It caused me to get stuck a couple of times by making my bridge key disappear before I realized what was happening.
You have a simple inventory that's mostly handy for picking up keys to unlock forcefields and extend bridges, along with bombs and health potions. The gunfighting is done by ducking into the background and then popping out to hit your enemy before he can take cover, too. What this does to the gameplay is that it turns combat into an exercise in patience and timing. The less antsy you are to just get a fight over with, the more likely you'll be to come out of it with a good amount of health. Things do get easier toward the end of the game, when your gun is upgraded, but then the game is also throwing more enemies at you in more challenging circumstances. As far as everything else goes, it really does play a lot like PoP, and like that game, my biggest challenge was mastering the timing of the running long jump.
I never did find a use for the no-look behind-the-back shooting method. It's just something that looks cool, I guess. I seem to recall that the SNES version allows you to actually free your friends from their chains but for some reason that's not in the DOS version. Using this freeware version downloaded from Blizzard's site, I found it to have a nasty bug - I'm not sure if it's always been there - that can cause inventory items to vanish if you aren't careful about highlighting the right item before unlocking a door. It caused me to get stuck a couple of times by making my bridge key disappear before I realized what was happening.