First of all, the Realms of Arkania Trilogy (German title: Das Schwarze Auge) was not developed by Sir-Tech, but by Attic Entertainment. It follows a group of adventurers as they thwart the Ork hordes with the help of a magical blade, find a stone to reunite the Elves and the Dwarves, and investigate a troubled city, Riva. All three games are based on the same roleplaying system, and they all have isometric, turn-based fights, but the presentation has seen some vast improvements throughout the trilogy.

While the first game has a completely fixed north-east-south-west point of view and little in the way of graphics that aren't equally boxed, the second game improves upon this by a free 360° viewpoint and 3D rendition of buildings, too. The third part does away with any chessboard-like maps finally, and presents the player with a true 3D environment. Battles are always handled from a 2D isometric point of view, and you'll never see any people walking around when not in a battle. Any interactions are usually handled with popup boxes containing text and pictures, as well as choices of action.

Dialogue with characters is handled in full-screen, with a number of options to the right and the conversations to the left. The options grow depending on what your group has already learned about, and while there are certain generic answers, conversations are usually never boring.

A quirk about this game is that "Warrior" is a career choice, as well as "Elf" or "Dwarf" or "Gypsy". Dwarves are just short Warriors, though, and Elves are pretty much a mixture between a Hunter and a Mage. If you are a hardcore Roleplayer, you'll be pleased to hear that there's lots of lists and numbers to browse through if you select Advanced Mode. I've found that this is usually the way to go, since you'll want to control which spells your characters get better at. Certain spells such as Teleportation can mean the difference between your group being stuck in a dungeon and starving to death, or escape.

Yes, they need food and water. They also need something warm for their heads, a raincoat and a decent herbalist in case that they get sick. And there are plenty of diseases and sicknesses for them to catch. None of these are harmless, and most of them can mean that your character loses some permanent stat-points or even dies if left untreated. Their shoes wear down with use, their weapons get chipped and break and if they haven't had any peace during the night, for example because they were ambushed, then their wounds won't heal.

On the flipside of this, you can sing, dance and cheat at cards when you're in a tavern. You can order food, and see your group comment on the quality of the meat (It's still moving on my plate!). You can rob merchants and you can haggle prices. You can hunt for game and sources of water in the evenings, as well as send someone out to collect herbs. All these are talents represented by numbers, and some of your characters will be much better at them than others.

The spells are quite powerful. You can wake up dead enemies to fight for you, speak to deceased party members, summon demons, blind your foes, rust their weapons, turn them to stone, make them turn on their friends or make them flee. And you'll want to use all of them, because there is no cannon fodder in this game. No enemy is too weak to hurt you, and every enemy that ran away means a better chance for your group to survive.

All in all, I grew up with this trilogy and can only recommend it. It's gritty, and it's fun, but I think the English translation may convey the humour in the dialogue not that well.

Blade of Destiny, Star Trail, Shadows over Riva are all solid Sir-Tech RPG's. Color coded map is nice. This company also made the Wizardy series.