Scholastic, £6.99, ISBN 978-1-407196-83-1
Fantasy, 2019
You are a warrior taking a well-deserved break after destroying Zanbar Bones. who last appeared as a demon prince in The Port of Peril. With that loser now disposed of, his ally Lord Azzur the boss of Port Blacksand is not amused and posts a 10,000 Gold Piece-reward for your head.
You aren’t aware of this, because you are taking your vacation just within sailing distance of that place despite having slain the ally of the most powerful gangster in the neighborhood. Hmm, your character is likely a mentally-deficient person.
Worse, you are “vacationing” in the sense that you are staying in a vermin-filled island of traps and worse because of a bet. You need to stay in Snake Island for 30 days to win a bet of 20 Gold Pieces, which you apparently need badly because who knows what you did with your treasures and plunder since that last campaign that this one is clearly a sequel to. Well, you soon discover the mess you are in when the assassins tempted by the reward on your head start tracking you down.
You decide to head off the island and look out for Lord Azzur, the guy that wants you dead. Why? Who knows. Clearly, your character is not altogether in the brainpower department.
Assassins of Allansia will remind you of the old Fighting Fantasy gamebooks by Ian Livingstone, and not in a good way. Randomness is the theme of the day, and it is a really dumb kind because your character is supposed to be familiar with the area, but you are made to pick between a series of random routes to head off to every single time. Will it kill Mr Livingstone to let you make some educated decision, by describing where each route leads to at least? No, you’re going to be basing your actions on the eenie-meenie school of decision-making.
This is pretty bad, because despite the randomness, you are expected to kill all the assassins on your rear end. Otherwise, at the very final act, you will be instant-killed, no saving roll allowed. It’s so stupid. You’ve destroyed a demon prince and cut off a dragon’s foot, but you can’t detect someone sneaking up to you, or at least put up a fight to defend yourself?
Since you are forced to make random turns of pages here, it is going to necessitate a few plays of this campaign to figure out the one true route to the good ending… and why should you? The plot is bare bones, the ending is a dumb cliffhanger, and the campaign doesn’t have any interesting scenes to remember.
Furthermore, the structure of the campaign is pretty lazy.
Early on, you will be bleeding fast Stamina, Luck, and even Skill points from random decisions you are forced to make—a clear effort by Mr Livingstone to condition you to not want to touch anything. At the same time, you will be thrown into one combat encounter after another, and these encounters are of moderate to “What? At this early stage?!” difficulties. Fun!
The campaign will then shift abruptly to actually throwing you all kinds of powerful items and Gold Pieces in consecutive encounters, and if you are conditioned to not to stupidly pick up or pillage the random chests and corpses you keep stumbling over like this is some bloody open world video game, you will be missing out on a lot of shortcuts and even essential items.
However, some of these essential items are obtained only if you make the lucky random choice, while some items actually put you in a tougher or even possibly fatal situation later on if you so happened to find them. One egregious example is a pair of earrings that will later save you from getting instant-killed by an assassin you may randomly encounter later on (of course, you need to defeat him to get a happy ending, so… good luck with the random turns of pages)—without those earrings, you die the moment you lose an attack round against that fellow, no saves allowed, and you can only obtain these earrings if you just happened to locate them, so yay.
Since as a gamebook reader you have the power of time warp—which is to say, there is nothing stopping you from going back to the previous entry and pick the other route once you meet a bad end—the unfair nature of the campaign or the randomness of it all may not be so bad, provided that the campaign has a strong and interesting plot and the whole journey feels satisfying to play.
This one, though, is just sloppily put together without even giving you a fair stab at making the best decisions for your character. Ian Livingstone is just yanking your chain around in this one, and if that’s your thing, hey, dig in. If not, you’re better off wasting your time on more interesting gamebooks out there.
