Tales of Dragon Mountain 2: The Lair Review

Puzzles, adventures, and the cutest elf I have ever seen. Mina Lockhart is back in Tales of Dragon Mountain 2: The Lair. It has been many years since Mina fought and won against Lord Strix. But he is back and badder than ever. Once again Mina must save her world against the evil Lord Strix.

The game starts out with a bit of dialogue between Lord Strix and one of his minions. Strix is ready for his “army” to be unleashed and his general informs him that they are not ready, that they still need to grow.  Let’s just say that Strix is still not a nice guy and he not currently happy with being told something cannot be done.  Strix vows that he will meet Mina soon. Umberto (a friend of Mina’s and Malik  who are both part of this adventure) is watching the entire exchange in a giant crystal ball. He freaks out and sends a letter to Malik asking him to grab Mina and meet at his house. The adventure begins at Umberto’s house where you start your quest.

This game is primarily a puzzle/adventure game. I would use adventure loosely because you do not have actual control of your character. You interact with your environment and do puzzles so that you are able to go forward. Every piece of each puzzle is important and sometimes you have to go back to a place you thought you had cleared up to retrieve a puzzle piece to move to the next level. You gain puzzle achievement points for completing the puzzles in your path. You do have the option of skipping puzzles and the computer will let you pass, but you lose out on points and that also defeats the purpose of the game. One example of the puzzles is finding all of the marbles for a particular stone statue. Once you found the stones, there are 6 rows of blocks. Pressing the different marbles, moves different rows of the blocks. You must line up all 6 rows of blocks before for a path is created for you to move on. Another in game competition is picking up stone dragons. There are hidden and sometimes even in plain sight everywhere. You want to collect them all to receive an achievement. .

The game has easy, medium, and difficult settings. I started on easy seeing as how I am not the best gamer and did not know what to expect. On easy, the game gives you hints about where you need to go. You have a hint button at the bottom of your screen. It point you in the direction that you need to go, or shows you if you are in the right place.  If you are on a setting other than easy, you use it and it takes time to recharge. It does not take any time to regenerate at all on easy.

Tales from the Dragon Mountain 2’s graphics are not what I expected. It is a super simplistic game with not a whole lot of moving parts. Everything is kind of rudimentary. You click on items to put them in your inventory. You have 8 slots in your inventory and I have never had them all used up at one time. You are constantly picking up things to solve puzzles, and when you solve them, the items move out of your inventory, making room for new ones.

There is a two part goal to this game. The first goal is to reach Strix. The second goal is to actually beat him. For this, you go through three separate worlds, counting on friends of Umberto’s who have hidden the “keys” at the request of Umberto to get to Strix. It isn’t over once you get to him. You still have puzzles, and enemies to conquer. Once you reach Strix, if you are like me, you realize he looks a lot like Emperor Palpatine or Darth Sideous, whichever you prefer. Mina talks a great game, and you must complete a puzzle to get a change at Strix. I am not telling you any more about it, I don’t want to ruin the surprise for you.

This is a cute game. I can see a young person just getting into video games loving it. Also, someone who lives for patterns and puzzles, because that is a majority of the game. While I do have an office, I typically play computer games on my laptop in the living room. My husband gave up watching tv shortly after I started the game and was sitting on the couch next to me trying to snatch my laptop away to solve a puzzle when I just wasn’t getting it. I would frequently have to shoo him off.

I look forward to the next Tales from Dragon Mountain, as I feel like there will definitely be another one.  Why do I feel this way? Go get a copy and  you’ll see why!

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary PC code was provided to Brash Games for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to editor@brashgames.co.uk.