Ishar III

STORY / GAMEPLAY
All Ishar games boast exceptional 3D graphics for their time, a huge game world, alternate solutions to puzzles and, the best of all features, different personalities and goals of each party members that make gameplay tenfold more colorful and fun; Ishar III is the best of the series. You start you journey controlling Zubaran or you can also import characters from any other game of the series and set off to hunt the dragon of Sith, the last survivor of the Great Black Dragons. In order to accomplish that, you need to go through a number of gates, each one warping you to a different time period. Each time period, like the islands of Ishar 2, has its own, unique landscapes and weather conditions. It's a quite large and pretty tough game that will occupy you for at least 20 hours of gameplay! Without any maps or walkthroughs, you can expect a good week (or more) of hardcore gaming, before finishing Ishar III. This Silmarils' trilogy, published from 1992 to 1994, is one of the few RPG series native to the Amiga and possibly the only RPG series of the 90s coming from France. Note that all three Ishar games are also available for the Atari ST and they are among those games few that supported the Atari Falcon.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The Amiga AGA version has awesome graphics using 256 colors on screen (although the Atari Falcon and PC version "trickily" show a few more colors). The animation (especially during the intro) is pretty smooth. In terms of sound, I must admit that the AGA game is exceptional! ISHAR III on the Amiga 1200 features a nice digitized intro tune and some great sampled sound effects, much like the Amiga 500 and Atari Falcon counterparts.