Game Reviews

The Sagas of Fire*Wolf

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The Sagas of Fire*Wolf

First and foremost, The Sagas of Fire*Wolf is a pretty decent bargain.

You get four books for the price of one, and while they might not be as swish as the likes of Appointment with F.E.A.R and 80 Days, there's still a huge amount of adventuring to be done here.

The game is presented in Tin Man's brilliant gamebook engine, and it's just as slick and poised as we've come to expect. Dice clatter, pages turn, and if you want to cheat you can stuff a digital finger in the page and flip back when you die.

The writing is solid enough, with plenty of fantasy names to remember, and a story about an exiled barbarian with a magnificent destiny waiting for him. It's standard fare, albeit written in third person rather than the usual first.

Barbaric

Anyone who's played any of Tin Man's earlier adaptations will be comfortable here. You roll some digital dice to set the stats of your character, then figure out whether you want to play in the traditional way, or go down the casual route with its healing and mulligans.

The story starts a little abruptly, and you might feel a little squished under the weight of fantastical names and descriptions of hierarchies, but once the preamble is out of the way, and you're with Fire*Wolf, things get much better.

The shift in perspective isn't as jarring as you might imagine, and it makes everything flow a little easier as well. Everything rips along with the pace of a blockbuster, and in a matter of pages you're off on a quest.

To be this good takes sagas

As you play you'll learn spells to use in combat, and receive items that can give you the edge in scraps. It adds a little more to the rhythm of dice rolls, and means there's a level of tactics to your brawling.

The Sagas of Fire*Wolf is a great bundle of gamebooks that should keep you entertained for hours. It's not going to appeal to anyone who doesn't like swords, spells, and strange cities, but if you're a gamebook fan there's a great deal here to enjoy.

The Sagas of Fire*Wolf

A conventional collection of entertaining gamebook action, The Sagas of Fire*Wolf is a solid entry into the Tin Man canon
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Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.