Hillsfar was the game that got me into the dungeons and dragons series on Amiga. I orginally played this on the old Amiga system and really loved it.
At the start you generate your own character in the old school D&D way of gender, face, race, but unlike the new D&D games you don't get to select your stats like strength or dexterity, but rather you roll for them. However, from numerous amount of game time playing this game I have never seen them come into play.
Most of the game pretty much centres around the city of Hillsfar which is home to various guilds for each of the classes, pubs, sewers and heaps of houses. Surrounding Hillsfar other locations that come in when questing.
The games objective is to go to the guild of whatever class you are and complete the tasks given to you by the master. Depending on which class you are the quest you perform are relative to them. For example, the fighter has to show his/her skills at the archery range and at the arena, whilst the thief really just steals stuff. On the original version you could save your character and transfer him/her to "Curse of the Azure Bonds" which is another Amiga D&D game.
The game holds a lot of variety
of HUDs with horse riding (side scroll), walking around Hillfar (first person), stealing from houses (third person) and performing the various mini games.
The game also has a lot of unique concepts that I haven't seen in RPGs before like the lock picking which involves matching a pick to the identical section in the lock.
The graphics are a bit of a let down considering the complexity of the game but the makers probably used the best they could at the time.
The game takes a different shift from the typical D&D RPG with no party or fighting monsters, which I thought would make the game same like a pointless spin-off. But the game is very good and does provide you with a lot of hours of serious questing and a lot of thinking since some of the quests require a lot of running around and figuring out.
My suggestion is that if you are a fan of the current D&D games and consider yourself a hardcore fan then play Hillsfar. It’s a great original in a field of its own and really adds to the self satisfaction of being one of the few to have played this great game.
