Chaos Strikes Back

1990 SyksyDungeonmaster: many have tried to copy it, nobody has come anywhere close. Until now. Chaos... started out as a few extra levels for Dungeonmaster, but the FTL boys got carried away and cobbled the sequel together into a completely standalone game that doesn't need the original DM. The downside, of course, was that we got to wait a whopping couple of years for the sequel. But boy, was it worth it!

CSB begins like the Bible: in the beginning there was darkness, but instead of the Spirit of God, a dense crowd of the purple worms' big brothers moves upon the void. That's a bit unfortunate, since the band of heroes is as naked as it is unarmed. So let 'Let there be light' be your opening line. And then you realise that there's no getting away: a closed door blocks the way. Once you get through this, the fun and games are over and the difficulties begin.

So Chaos wasn't that easily squashed after all. The crafty Chaos Lord had a dungeon vault built, divided into four parts. Each of the mazes of the Fighter, the Ninja, the Priest and the Wizard leads to a central pillar in which corbum has been embedded. This pillar sucks mana out of the world and will in time bring about the destruction of the entire universe. The corbum has to be removed and thrown into the FUL YA pit to be destroyed.

Technically, Chaos Strikes Back is identical to Dungeonmaster. Apart from the new monsters and items, the menus and the rest of the graphics alike are completely familiar.

There is one big difference in the game. Dungeonmaster was tied to its levels, meaning that to make progress it was enough to keep burrowing your way further down. In Chaos the game flows 'freely' from one level to another, and the risk of losing your bearings is in a whole other league.

Dungeonmaster and Chaos alike are splendid examples of the role-playing game that makes real use of the computer. Both are entirely mouse-controlled (although in time-critical spots the keyboard is a necessity). The handling of items and other objects is a triumph of ergonomics: not one of the clones has come anywhere near it. The graphics are brilliant, the effects too despite their sparseness, the game's design and execution perfect.

Moving is done by clicking the mouse on the arrows at the bottom right, and fighting is simple too. At the right-hand edge of the screen there's a menu in which the weapon or item each hero holds in their hand appears as a silhouette. A click of the mouse brings up a menu from which you choose how to use the item or weapon. Bows, slings and shuriken can be thrown; swords and other close-combat weapons have more or fewer possible ways of striking depending on fighter level. The use of magic items and ropes is chosen the same way as well.

Magic is vital in Dungeonmaster and Chaos alike. Spells are formed by combining different runes in the magic menu above the weapon menu, and there are a little over twenty of them. Chaos, by the way, doesn't explain what the runes mean, let alone provide a spell list, so DM experience is essential.

The right mouse button brings up a screen for the individual hero, where you can feed them, check their levels, gauge their need for food and drink, load their quivers and examine items.

Gaining experience is logical: wizard and priest levels build up through casting spells, fighter and ninja levels through fighting, and not in some idiotic 'training halls' or in front of 'boards of examiners'. Experience points aren't even displayed.

The Utilities disk that comes in the package lets you do all sorts of neat things. The least noteworthy is the CSB demo, in which the Chaos Lord frolics in the bowels of a volcano. The character editor turns an old DM save disk into a starting setup for Chaos. The old characters are, however, stripped of every last piece of equipment, sob! If your DM saved game either contains heroes you consider too feeble, or else you simply don't have one, you can visit the prison in Chaos to fetch heroes of roughly Adept/Expert level and make a party of them. Real hard men use RE-INCARNATE.

When Chaos first came out, many of our foreign counterparts claimed that you could only stay alive with a DM party of heroes. That's b*llsh*t. The character editor also includes a small paint program with which you can make the heroes look however you like.

The most interesting option is the oracle. If you run into an unsolvable problem in the game, you have to save, quit and let the oracle analyse the saved game, whereupon it gives you murky hints. Thank God for that, because measured against the problems in CSB, Dungeonmaster didn't really have any.

In Dungeonmaster, on the lowest levels, a tear might come to your eye and a couple of swear words might go flying at the cruel programmers. In Chaos Strikes Back the floor gets wet and the swear words fly in dense flocks. The game is so full of treacherous traps, 'impossible' places and general unfairness that back when it came out, solving it at times seemed purely hypothetical. It did get solved, actually half by accident: a party of heroes at death's door happened to flee through the right door and just barely managed to kill a couple of demons on the wrong side of it too. And the corbum pieces were found on the survivors as well. I have to admit that the ending was a mild disappointment. The second time round too.

Since there's no shortage of crayons, let's draw you a picture: if you haven't played Dungeonmaster, don't start with Chaos. It is not meant for rookies.

One of Dungeonmaster's best features was the escalating difficulty. The player was, as it were, guided into the game's world, and the writings on the walls gave valuable hints. Chaos starts out hard and carries on feeling nearly impossible, without any easy, ego-boosting problems.

As for the allure of Chaos and Dungeon Master, let it be said that I got a fine excuse to play DM through in order to get a party together for a fresh run through Chaos. The project after that, naturally, was to play Chaos through with reincarnated characters. A classic.