Okay, a quick confession before the review starts proper: I've never been much of a fan of Ian Livingstone's work. While I'll grudgingly admit that Deathtrap Dungeon was a great gamebook and Freeway Fighter a decent idea, the majority of his books have just left me cold. They tend to follow a very set formula: lots of fighting, very little storyline, average writing, unfair puzzles, a requirement for the reader to discover a dozen different items before the end of the book or just simply fail… So when I heard he was writing a new Fighting Fantasy book, I didn't exactly jump for joy. If Steve Jackson had agreed to write it, I'd still be jumping.

But I decided I'd at least give it a fair shot before expressing my opinion on it.

So here it is, for better or worse: Fighting Fantasy 21 - Eye Of The Dragon.

The Tale of the Dumb Adventurer

You play a generic adventuring hero. You know the sort: big, beefy fellow, terrifically good with a sword who, despite having possible SKILL and STAMINA scores high enough to make him the world's best fighter, is still trekking around run of the mill dungeons in search of treasure.

You're down on funds and staying at the Blue Pig Tavern in Fang (allowing Livingstone to namedrop Deathtrap Dungeon, a far better book). Here, you meet a fellow adventurer by the name of Henry Delacor. Now Henry Delacor, as luck would have it, knows of a dungeon not far away in which a fabulous treasure is hidden. What are the odds…?

He's willing to tell you all the details you need to find this dungeon, and the treasure within. The catch? All you need to do is drink this vial of slow acting poison (to which he has the antidote) so he knows you'll bring him back a share of the treasure by way of reward instead of just absconding with the lot. Now at this point, anyone with half a brain would have stopped and thought "hang on, he's expecting me to drink poison?" and promptly told Henry Delacor where to get off. Not so with the hero in Ian Livingstone's latest below par tale. Nope, you take the poison and gulp it down without a second thought. No wonder you're always so short of funds if you're this stupid.

Déjà Vu

Ever feel you're playing a gamebook that has been done before? Well, you'll feel that more than ever if you play Eye Of The Dragon. Remember all those long and winding corridors with doors on several sides that found their way into Deathtrap Dungeon, Trial Of Champions and many other Livingstone 'classics'? Well, they're here as well. In fact, a good portion of the book involves nothing more inspiring than simply wandering along very mundane corridors and deciding whether or not you want to open a perfectly ordinary door. Ho hum. You can see just how Mr Livingstone writes so many books. He just uses the same ideas over and over again. And they're not even particularly good ideas.

Push open a door and you find a whole variety of unlikely people and places beyond. One room even has a merchant. A merchant? What, he decided to set up shop not in a city but in a dungeon inhabited by hordes of monsters underneath Darkwood Forest? Yeah, right… Actually it was nice meeting the merchant because at least it introduced me to someone dumber than an adventurer who willingly drinks poison.

Other rooms contain pretty standard adventuring fare: a throne which adds a nice little boost to your SKILL if you sit on it*, dozens of items which seem to serve no little purpose and the usual monsters to kill. There are a few NPCs from time to time but their dialogue is so poorly written that it often seems like they've been replaced with cardboard cut outs while you weren't looking.

* An amazing magical device which can actually boost the fighting abilities of someone who sits upon it just so happens to be found in a dungeon beneath Darkwood Forest? Apparently so.

Confusing Rules

As ever with Fighting Fantasy, the rules leave quite a lot to be desired. A passage in the rules at the start states that your SKILL score can never increase beyond its initial amount, unless specifically stated in the text of the book. Throughout the book, I found four or five different SKILL boosts. So does that mean I could theoretically have reached a SKILL of 17*?

* When playing Ian Livingstone gamebooks, it's advisable to cheat and give yourself the maximum scores to begin with. You haven't a hope of finishing them otherwise.

Silly Choices

One thing that annoyed me more than anything else about Eye Of The Dragon is that the majority of options presented to you are, well, kind of dumb. Take the very first section: a hut. You're given the choice of descending the steps leading to the dungeon or searching the hut beforehand. Which one are you likely to do first? Gee, big decision. I know. I'll ignore the option to search the hut and just head on down the steps and miss anything useful that quite conveniently is lying here. Hmmm…

As it happens, there's an axe head in the hut bearing a strange inscription. Obviously the sort of dumb adventurer chap who picks up every bit of garbage he comes across, you're intrigued by this and decide to take it with you. Intrigued by an axe head, eh? The poor fellow needs to get out more.

A good part of the book is pretty similar to this kind of thing. You're walking down a corridor and come across a door - do you open it or not? You find a chest in a room - open it or not? More than anything, this smacks of a writer who just really couldn't be bothered, had run out of ideas and wrote the book as quickly as possible. No matter how desperate Wizard Books were for a new gamebook, surely they could have done better than this?

Conclusion

Eye Of The Dragon is the first brand new Fighting Fantasy gamebook since Curse Of The Mummy in 1995 yet at no point does it ever read like a new gamebook. If anything, it reads like something that Ian Livingstone probably wrote twenty years ago and was so embarrassed about that he hid it away and vowed to never to let it see the light of day again… until now. Quite why such an uninspired gamebook was picked as the first brand new Fighting Fantasy gamebook in ten years is something of a mystery. Throw a stone in a crowd and you'd doubtless hit someone capable of writing something more accomplished. Frankly, even by the low standards of Ian Livingstone's books in the past, Eye Of The Dragon is bad.

RATING: 1 out of 10