Quest for Glory 3: Wages of War

Magician, Fighter or Thief?

A conversation

Egypt-like pyramid entrance

Quest for Glory 3: Wages of War is the third game in the wonderful point-and-click adventure game series published by Sierra On-line, Inc. The Quest for Glory series are known for their beautifully hand-drawn graphics and interesting storyline and this is the first time Sierra used the VGA graphics in the game series (the previous games had less than 256 colors graphics) to visualize the beautiful egypt-themed landscapes of Tarna. Many of the Quest for Glory games in the series were fun to play. This game is no exception. It takes place in the land known as Tarna, similar in its environments to Afrika. The land is shared by humans as well as strange humanoid creatures with lion heads some of which can switch form between animal and human as they wish. The game is very interesting and your character's mission is to prevent the civil war in Tarna between the two ancient factions that are in conflict accusing one another of theft. Solving this conflict doesn't come for free. Download this game and you will know why, the game can stretch over long hours of game-play, especially for those less familiar with the adventure point-and-click genre. An interesting story supports the gameplay. The theme of the conflict in the game goes something like this. The humanoid Simbani have lost their ancient spear and blame the Leopard men, while the Leopard men blame the Simbani for stealing their ancient drum. The situation is on the brink of war and your quest is to prevent that from happening by using your wit and diplomacy. Aside from the story itself, the game uses an interesting mix between Role-Playing and the traditional point-and-click adventure games invented by Sierra in the previous two games from the series. In the beginning of the game, you can choose the type of a character you want to play: a Magician, Fighter or Thief. The graphics are similar to another classic Sierra game Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers in that they were first hand drawn and scaled to fit the classic DOS resolution of 320x200 pixels screen. The screens were then touched up to clean up the scaling artifacts or to add important objects to the screen the player would appear behind of, or that could be otherwise used or "looked at" in the game. Overall, the game maps are beautifully rendered in their 256-color VGA glory and look quite nice for its time. The game also features nice voice-over work thanks to the skilled voice actors who bring the 2-dimensional characters to life. It is possible to cheat through the game, and I'm sure many of the gamers take advantage of the cheats, but personally, I never cheated in any of the adventure games I have played before, simply because I think that trying to rely on the actual hints created a much more enjoyable experience. I rarely use walk-throughs for the same reason. Having said that, the puzzles in the game are relatively simple to figure out with only a few exceptions which makes the experience very enjoyable where you don't try to figure out one puzzle for hours only to find out that it didn't make sense at all, like in some of the other point-and-click adventure games of the DOS-era. There are quite a few "easter eggs" that add more value to the gameplay.

Tarna during the day

Tarna at night

The king