Going in, I hoped that Dragons of Flame would be an improvement on Heroes of the Lance since it's a sequel. This time, instead of being a dungeon crawler, you also have an entire overworld with towns, NPCs, and dungeons. There are multiple objectives and you're racing against the clock because a big army of Draconians is laying waste to all in its path.

I like the ambition, but this isn't an improvement. I think it might be worse than the original game, even. The controls are mostly the same as last time, and you have the same set of characters, but a few things changed enough that I wanted to quit after just 5-10 minutes.

First, though, something positive: you can actually see the remaining casts of a given spell you have now. You can also rest your party to recover these spells once they've been spent. Now the negatives: combat (without using spells) is even more problematic than in Heroes of the Lance. Despite this game not moving at a very quick speed, like the original, enemies are on you so quickly and they rip your people to shreds. In Heroes of the Lance, my best solution was using the cleric and mage to cast a variation of a stun, sleep, or holding spell to make combat less painful for my warriors.

In Dragons of Flame, enemies can shrug these spells off in seconds and go right back to disemboweling my people. Some enemies that show up very early in the game (like within the aforementioned 5-10 minutes of starting) are either very resilient or outright invulnerable to my starting weapons. They just won't die, but other stuff drops quickly. I'm not sure how you're supposed to escape combat without killing every enemy in a given encounter either. I read through the instruction manual but nothing came up for dealing with seemingly unkillable enemies.

I ran into an NPC at one point and walked into him. As with enemies on the overworld, this brings you to a side-scrolling screen that replicates the basic combat gameplay that comprised all of Heroes of the Lance. I go up to the NPC and talk to him and he says he's fleeing Draconians and joins my party as an additional team member. Immediately, enemies start spawning into the screen and cutting my lead guy to pieces. I kept retreating to the left as more appeared and tried hitting them with spells. Nothing worked for more than a few seconds, but I managed to kill everyone with my lead guy barely alive. I then got sent back to the overworld screen and starting using the cleric to heal him back up.

I take the time to look at the map screen and I see that these flames that I think represent the destruction and pillaging brought by the Draconian army have now spread from one area near the top of the map to like half of the whole world. What? The instruction manual says that you need to make sure to go to the northern towns first because they have things you need for winning the game and can be lost if you take too long. Did I take too long? The towns appear to be engulfed in flames for miles around and I'd only been playing for a handful of minutes.

I decided to head north into the flames anyway because it seems weird that the enemy forces would spread so quickly that you get softlocked in mere minutes. Maybe the flames on the map just represent where Draconians are active in the world? Anyway, on my way to one of the northern settlements I bump into an enemy and get pulled into the action/combat screen again. Multiple enemies start pouring out, so I go straight to attacking while sometimes invoking a heal spell. A few enemies die, but then one tanks through multiple attacks and heal attempts on my part and starts killing everyone. I could've tried throwing a fireball or something at him, but since he didn't care about my other spells much I didn't care to experiment more.

At this point I shut the game off. Between taking the time to read the whole manual before starting and not doing anything too wild in-game (don't walk into the flame areas? but how else am I supposed to get to the northern settlements in time/at all?), I didn't want to see any more. You need to give me more to work with than this or I'm not playing your game.