GZ - "The final paragraphs of the gamebook Island of the Lizard King contain a scene I can still remember clearly today, nearly thirty years after I first read it. It stamped itself on my ten-year old brain because it seemed so hideous at the time."
The Lizard King is the first book in the Fighting Fantasy series to shed the trap/puzzle formula of previous books and rely mostly on creature encounters. This makes the game more difficult, as most enemy encounters can’t be avoided. Like its predecessors, Island of the Lizard King includes three difficulty settings: First is Adventurer, a mode where you play the Lizard King the way it was intended. You are given unlimited bookmarks (i.e. save games) and your Stamina (i.e health) is calculated by rolling two, six-sided dice + 12.
Now firmly established as the darling of adventure gamebook apps, it’s understandable to approach any of Tin Man Games’s latest releases with a certain set of expectations. Fortunately, Fighting Fantasy: Island of the Lizard King continues to match such expectations, offering a great and nostalgic experience.
Kidnapped by a vicious race of Lizard Men from Fire Island, the young men of Oyster Bay face a grim future of slavery, starvation and a lingering death. Their master will be the mad and dangerous Lizard King, who holds sway over his land of mutants by the strange powers of black magic. Will YOU risk all in an attempt to save the prisoners?
Fighting Fantasy eh? That's not at all meant to leech off the popularity of other games I'm sure...
The Fighting Fantasy series pioneered paperback role-playing books in the early 1980's. In fact, there was nothing like it at the time. Each book used a dice rolling system for combat. The reader had to use pen and paper to keep track of the items they found during their adventure. Additionally, the books came with their own inventory page if you wanted to use that instead. The Fighting Fantasy series not only came first, but itinspired many different Gamebooks over the years (including the Gamebook Adventure series by Tin Man Games).
