When you miss a key the result is always death. You’ll then be forced to watch the death sequence, a filler screen that shows Dirk turning into a skeleton, and then the entire lead-in animation to the room in which you died. This can all take entirely too much time and quickly leads to frustration as you will sometimes die the moment you step foot in a room and have to wait several long seconds before you can try again, or conversely you will die at the end of a long sequence and be forced to watch everything all over again. And again, and again, and … you die so often in the game that you’re guaranteed to spend a significant portion of your game time sitting and watching the same videos over and over again. This may have been part of the original design to make the game’s very short actual gameplay seem longer to arcade goers, but home gamers would rather spend their time playing a game than worrying about whether they got their quarter’s worth of entertainment. Making matters worse is the game’s lack of a save feature. Every time you sit down to play the game you will have to replay everything that you’ve seen before. Not only that, the only way to beat the game is to play through the entire thing in one sitting. Very few gamers are going to have that kind of patience for a game that deals out the frustration to the degree done so by this game.

Anyone who did not play the original game in the arcades is sure to be dumbfounded by its status as a classic. Those who did may begin to question the accuracy of their fond memories. In any case it is hard to recommend this game to anyone but the most diehard of Dragon’s Lair fans.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 20%.  Some things from the past are better left in the past.

System Requirements:  Pentium II 200 MHz; 4x CD-ROM.

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