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To be honest, I've never been a huge fan of Sierra's King's Quest games. In my opinion, it's been a mildly enjoyable point-and-click series, with all the usual limitations and problems such games suffer from. Still, I have enjoyed them, and that enjoyment led me to try out Mask of Eternity.

Once again, the Kingdom of Daventry is in peril and one lone man stands between it and eternal ruin. The particulars may differ, but it's the same plot we've seen in the rest of the series: find the magic item and kill the bad guy. Hey, it works for me.

Sierra has attempted to blend multiple genres with this title. Unfortunately, I can't say that I'm impressed with the results. Mask of Eternity attempts to combine 3rd person views (a la Tomb Raider) with 1st person camera angles and combat (like Quake), throws in a level system vaguely reminiscent of an RPG (say, Might & Magic), and tops it all off with puzzles (similar to any previous King's Quest.) The real problem is that by attempting to throw so many ingredients into the game, it doesn't succeed at any one thing particularly well.

Combat is as dull as it gets. Your options are to either sit back and shoot at an enemy with a ranged weapon, or run in and hack mindlessly. There's no strafing capability, so there's no real way to dodge any missile attacks coming at you. Similarly, when in close combat, all you can do is swing. There is a "big swing" for variable damage, but it takes so long to use that you're often knocked out of it. The game lacks any ability to parry, move about in combat, or generally avoid getting hit. Think of a Quake game in which both combatants had to stand still while fighting. Not much fun, eh? Fortunately, the combat's so easy that it's not a big deal.

More annoying are the "puzzles." That word's in quotes for a reason... there's nothing all that challenging in the game. Many adventure games can be easily solved by picking up every item the player runs across, then clicking each one in turn on an object when the player's stuck. Mask of Eternity doesn't sufffer from this flaw, though -the puzzles are too simple to actually give a player pause. (There is one notable exception, which I'll talk about shortly.) Items that are necessary to solve a puzzle are typically found right next to the same puzzle, or at least within the same world. Overall, it adds up to a very short gaming experience that doesn't really pack any excitement. This could have been easily solved by either making the puzzles somewhat trickier, or at least scattering the items required to solve one throughout the various worlds of the game. One or two puzzles also suffered from the old "hunt the pixel" routine: the object either wasn't visible until clicked on, or just the right portion of the object had to be clicked in order to use it or pick it up.

As I said, though, there is one exception to the "easy puzzle" rule. At several points in the game, the player is required to make a series of agonizingly precise jumps between various platforms. Failure to nail these jumps exactly results in instant death. This seems especially common in the Barren Region, where there are no less than three sequences that require a player to jump from rock to rock to cross a lava pit. Lava, as all good gamers know, results in horrible termination by fire if so much as a toe enters it. (There are several places in Mask of Eternity where simply standing near lava also kills the player. I presume it's because the 3D detection engine thinks you've crossed a surface boundary, even though the screen shows you haven't.) The jumping problem is compounded by the fact that the main character has 2 jumping distances: really short and really far. The rocks, of course, are all spaced so that the far jump carries you over them, while the small jump clears the gap only if you're standing on the perfect pixel.

Here's my free tip of the day to budding game designers: jumping puzzles suck. They haven't been fun since, oh, 1984. And for God's sake, is it necessary to have no less than four in a single game? Did nobody learn the lesson of Ultima 8?

Finally, the cutscenes can be fairly repetitious. It would be nice if there were a way to exit from a scripted scene through the use of the Escape key. Several times I'd click on an object to make sure I'd drained it of information, only to be forced to sit through another three minute spiel about how evil the villain is.

Nobody replays adventure games. What's the point, when you've solved it once? In addition, Mask of Eternity is one of the shortest games I've played to date. It took slightly less than 20 hours to breeze through the entire thing. It would have taken less if it weren't for the constant reloading of saved games due to death by lava. Even on a p2/266, load times were in excess of 45 seconds per save. This assumes you're loading a game that was saved in the same region you died in... if your savegame was from a previous region, then load times are in excess of 2 minutes!

The lack of strafing capability rendered missile combat pointless. Mouselook is limited to up and down; the keys are needed to turn. Even then, there's no option to invert the up/down axis, so I found myself disoriented for the first couple hours.

Then, of course, there's that whole set jumping distance bit. Let's not talk about that again.

Certainly, the graphics have come a long way. Daventry looks very pretty, especially when viewed in 3DFX mode. The creatures move in different ways: some shuffle, some hop, others rise from lava in a cloud of flames. On a related note, however, the graphics were somewhat choppy when I moved around. My test system was a P2/266 with a 12MB Voodoo2 board; I would have expected silky smoothness similar to Unreal or Quake. Instead, I'd guess that turning in place yielded a barely acceptable 15 frames/second. Make sure you have some horsepower if you play with all the graphics enabled!

I must admit that the ambient sound was quite good. Wind whistles, bats screech, frogs croak. The only real sound issue I had was with the stock cutscenes. When you talk to NPCs, the camera typically cuts out to a 3rd person view in order to show your interaction. While this isn't a problem of itself, the stereo separation doesn't follow. An NPC on the left of the screen talks only out of the left speaker; however, your voice is heard out of both, despite the fact that you're standing on the right. While stereo tracking is nice for ambient sounds, several times I thought one of my speakers was unplugged because the NPC's voice only came out of one side but mine came out of both.

Installation is pretty simple on any Win95/98 system. It's got the standard install wizard that most programs use these days. Only 2 complaints: first, my system hung in the middle of DirectX install. While the DirectX install was apparently complete, it took a reboot to verify that. Second, there's really no reason that Sierra should require that all their games be installed in a subfolder off of a "Sierra" directory. I know it's minor, but I like to pick my own folders for installation.

I have to say I was disappointed by this game. It seems that the King's Quest series has become less and less challenging as it has evolved. I could handle this if the combat or advancement were any good, but they're like the side of peas at a Thanksgiving turkey dinner - there to try, but not interesting. If you're looking for a good adventure game, I'd say dust off Zork: Inquisitor or Gabriel Knight II and play `em again, Sam.