The Lance! review

What? Another awesome review so soon? That’s right! It’s time for you to learn a little bit about The Lance!.

Meet your very own jousting grounds.

                 

Come young knight, a tournament has been organized to entrust the all-mighty Lance to the best jouster alive, and it’s your destiny to claim it. Or at least one of your descendants… Put your game face on and prepare to joust through a five stage challenge, where your objective is to defeat every enemy and ultimately reclaim your spot as the champion.

Here’s how it works, each battle is divided into two stages: in the first one you have to click the mouse in order to achieve maximum riding speed (the faster you are, the more damage you deal); and a second one, where you have to point your lance at the desired hitting spot of your enemy - a dynamic dummy which allows you to hit the head, body, shield or horse. You win by either removing your enemy’s helmet or armor, but here’s the catch: you can’t hit the horse, and the enemy shield moves around trying to block your attack, resulting in a mini-game of hide-and-seek between your lance and the opposing shield. Each attack removes a bit of “health” from the piece it hits, which varies according to your equipment and the enemy's.

The second phase of jousting: aiming.

                

Besides leveling your character, you can upgrade your five pieces of equipment at the store (helmet, armor, shield, lance and horse), and each of these pieces also accumulate experience until it reaches its “mastered” state, where you achieve its full stats. Fortunately money doesn’t come easily, so you’ll have to carefully think which upgrades to buy first, and which ones to skip. Keep in mind though that the better and faster your wins are, the more gold you rack.

Jousting equipment store out of nowhere!

                 

The last round is – of course – against the King’s champion, and this one offers a nice challenge mainly because of the power gap between your stats and his. By now you are probably thinking how the hell in just four rounds can you properly equip yourself to defeat this titanic boss. Well, you will lose, but when you do, the challenge is passed to your offspring, and so forth until you finally conquer the Lance.

Although the game is a little old, seeing that I replayed it today just so I could write this review should tell you a little something about it: it is fun. Short yes – I ended this time with my third generation, about half an hour of gaming – but strangely fun with a nice piece of art too, leaving me no choice but to recommend it. So go ahead and give it a try.

Game rating: 7.5/10