Curse of the Azure Bonds is basically the second game resale in the D&D world the would be considered a strategy RPG, the first being Pool of Radience. This game was also based off the book with the same title. In this game, the heroes (or new characters) from Pool of Radience have awoken from slumber to find odd azure tattoos on their arms. Their armour and weapons have been taken and they lose control of themselves at times. The tattoos control them.
An interesting point also, characters from the book appear in the game to help you on your quest to remove the tattoos. The game generally plays like its older brother Pool of Radience. While in dungeons you travel in First Person. When you leave town you get a large map of the area you can travel. The bread and butter of these games is the battles sequences. This game was one of the first games I played that placed characters on a grid and allowed them to move around the battlefield. Another nice feature was you could port your characters from the previous game into this game. Graphically the game was average.
Character creation was fun, but most characters had a limited amount
of detail in there creation, (mostly different colour shirts, pant, and weapons. Two really annoying aspects of the game I did not like were: It was nice to be able to port your characters but most likely you were going to create your characters because of the new job classes that weren’t offered in the first game. Second thing was to get through many of the battles you need to cast Haste spells on your characters, which aged them 1 year. This might not seem bad but after 30 castings of the spell your characters became older and were worthless if you decided to port them to the next instalment of the series.
I played this game on the C64 so load times were pretty bad also. All in All Curse of the Azure bonds was a pretty good game for its time. It was a decent Strategy RPG, and had a pretty good story to keep you interested. Some of the battles were difficult but could be beaten with some thought. It could have been great with some improvements in load times, better character modelling, and making easier to beat major battles without using the haste spell.
