Curse of the Azure Bonds is basically an 80's version of Baldur's gate. It is based on the dungeons and dragons rules. You get to create a party of six player characters, picking class, race, etc, and then through the combat and events, build up their experience so they gain levels and hit points because the challenges get harder and harder as the game goes on. The story line is pretty good. I used to play it on a C64 and the graphics were colorful - I'm sure the Amiga version is a little better.
The game is turned based so you can’t just command a character to attack a monster until it’s dead – you have to command the character to attack every round, so the fighting can get a little tedious when there are many foes. It does make it easier to plan your strategy, though because the game waits for you to enter your command. You can sit and think about what you want to do for a while.
The monsters and foes were straight out of the dungeons and dragons books. The game manual had some descriptions, but having all the dungeons and dragons books was a plus. Your players could get killed and as long as you didn’t flee the battlefield you could bring them back
to life with a resurrection spell. You could also just add a new character to replace them, but they wouldn’t have the experience and gear they needed.
There was some type of glitch in the save mechanism where you could export a player from the party after giving all their good gear to other players then add them back in from an export on another disk with all their gear so you could get unlimited money and outfit the party nicely.
I only played it all the way through once, but it took me a long time to do it. I’m sure there were cheats available for it, but I never knew them. You could modify your player character attributes (strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution, charisma) and I did mess with that a little to make sure the fighters had high strength and constitution, the clerics had high wisdom, and the magic users had high intelligence.
If you are a dungeons and dragons geek from the 80’s, you’ll probably enjoy this wonderful game! I recommend downloading it immediately!
