Gateway to the Savage Frontier Retrospective Review

The CRPG Addict continues to make progress on his endeavor to review virtually every role-playing game ever made, with his latest conquest being SSI’s less regarded Gold Box title, Gateway to the Savage Frontier. Check out parts one, two, three, four, five, and six to learn everything you’d need to know about the RPG, or just hit the GIMLET conclusion below:

I don’t really feel like spending time on a full GIMLET where I’ve already done like seven of these for Gold Box games. Let’s do the quick bulleted version:

– 5 points for the game world. Gateway doesn’t make horrible use of the Forgotten Realms setting, and I suppose it tries to tell a decent story. It needed to do a better job on the individual maps to make the player feel he’s actually accomplishing something as he clears out monsters and undead. I did like the extra textual and graphic touches given to each map to make it feel more like a real place.

– 5 points for character creation and development. It has the usual D&D advantages, and a few in-game acknowledgements of character race, sex, and class, but advancement is extremely uneven and some of the classes cap way too soon.

– 5 points for NPC interaction. There are are some memorable NPCs, some of whom can join the party, but the Gold Box series still isn’t doing much in the way of dialogue options.

– 5 points for encounters and foes. Again, the Gold Box series offers some of the best monster variety out there, with plenty of opportunities for grinding if necessary, but the game has virtually no-combat encounters. None of the Gold Box games have come close to improving on Pool of Radiance in that area. This one did to a better job with pre-combat encounter text.

– 7 points for magic and combat. Still no complaints about the Gold Box engine here.

– 5 points for equipment. Reasonably good, but nothing new. The game is a little stingier than most until the end. Still no in-game item descriptions, and I’ve never liked the way that item distribution is fixed.

– 4 points for the economy. It starts better than most games in the lineage and offers a “money sink” in the way of magic arrows and potions, but it’s still horribly unbalanced. The series will never get this right.

– 3 points for quests. I didn’t find the main quest compelling, and I’m disappointed in the lack of side quests along the way. Every city had a “lord” NPC and should have had a couple of quests, too. I give an extra point for a couple of alternate (bad) endings.

– 6 points for graphics, sound, and interface. Despite a couple of interface flaws, the Gold Box remains unmatched in this area. Some graphics improvements (this is the first in the series to feature VGA graphics) were generally welcome even if I didn’t like some of the styles.

– 4 points for gameplay. It has the illusion of being nonlinear but really isn’t. It’s also a little too easy, and in general it’s not very replayable. But the pacing and length are okay.

That gives us a final score of 49, which I’m afraid is the lowest score I’ve given so far to a Gold Box title, but only by 1 (Secret of the Silver Blades got 50). Though low for the series, we have to note that it still puts Gateway in the 90th percentile of all the games on my list.