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Take a journey to a mystical land where Arch Mages battle for supremacy of magical new worlds – battle to become the LORDS OF CHAOS

You would have thought in 1990 this would have been a pretty big statement for a video game to make.  The UK still hadn’t seen much of the 16 bit consoles and the Amiga was still king. If a household had any kind of games device it would probably be an Amiga, Atari-ST, Commodore 64, Spectrum or Amstrad.

The whole market was very similar, you would still get the movie licenced games, which arguably were of higher quality than the more recent attempts, and the games based on popular TV shows. So in-between the copies of Postman Pat and Dangermouse there would more often than not be games that break the trend and walk a different path.

One such title was Lords of Chaos, with a look very similar to the X-com games and a massive potential it put you in the boots of a custom created wizard who was bidding to become the next ruler of the realm. The single player experience took your wizard through a series of scenarios in which you generally had to last for X number of turns and leave via a randomly placed portal once the time comes.

The blurb on the back of the box reads :

Produced by the designers of Laser Squad, Mythos Games have packed excitement and strategy into a game bursting with features : 1- 4 players can battle against each other or highly intelligent computer opponents, make potions, cast up to 45 different spells, collect treasure and fight mythical creatures in this multi-level adventure

Now in 1990 I was the tender age of 8 when my brother bought a copy of LoC for £9.99 probably from WH-Smiths, and it was quite possibly the first entry in what would become a strong love for turn-based Strategy RPGs that would still be with me at this day. The ideas behind the game are ones that I don’t even think have been recreated in any modern game and if it HAS I would LOVE to know about it.

Once loaded the game treats you with the wizard creation screen, you couldn’t simply select a pre-made wizard, you had to create from scratch a wizard who could not only survive a fight with a dragon, but also create enough minions and damage to take out another enemy.

The game was genius, instantly a hit in my household we would often spend a Sunday creating our characters, or loading our single player characters up for a bit of extra strength. The beauty of the game was in the ability to save your single player wizard and load it into the game with all XP acquired so that you can bring those few extra spells and have the ability to risk a dragon spell on the off chance you will run into a Dragon Herb on your travels.

The manual includes a token in the back for you to send off to get the first expansion pack that unfortunately I don’t think ever came out, at least not on the C64. It touted two new scenarios “Island of Iris” and “Tombs of the Undead”.

LoC is a very solid title, pretty good AI and lots of interesting monsters to conjure and spells to cast, and is only probably let down by the lack of scenarios on the single player as with hundreds of different ways to build your character there is always a different way to play and the random layout of the map each time gave the game that level of unpredictablity.

While Laser Squad has been rehashed and rebuilt in many different forms under the X-com name, LoC hasn’t received the same treatment. Possibly due to the geek stigma of the fantasy genre during the period but it is certainly a title I would love to see come back on something like Xbox Live or the DS with some kind of play by e-mail structure that would work exceedingly well in a game like this.

If anyone has any information on a remake or similar games then please leave a comment and let me know!

P.S – I found a copy of StarPaws in the box as well! what a game.