I just finished this game which came out several years ago. I played it on Windows 7 x86 and x64 with no problems. Robin Hood is a pretty good tactical strategy game in real time. You control up to five characters at a time in missions to rescue people, steal gold, and liberate towns.

There are several main characters, some of whom you begin the game with and some of whom you find or rescue as you progress through the game. The game uses clovers as lives; you can collect clovers in missions either on the ground or typically after completing a quest. You can have up to 10 clovers at a time and you can use these to resurrect your main characters at half strength if they are killed.

You also recruit merry men throughout the game. Merry men can accompany you on missions as well as playable characters. There are 3 different merry men: strong, aggressive and mustachioed. The mustachioed (archers) are the most useless of the 3 and you won’t use them for long. Strong men are useful for a while because they can knock out opponents and carry them around (for hiding). They are eventually replaced by Little John. The aggressive men can fight as well, can kill knocked out opponents, and most importantly can heal characters with herbs (they can carry up to 10 herbs at a time).

The game can be interesting (and frustrating) in the beginning as your characters are weak (you can train characters between missions by leaving them in Sherwood Forest  with a trainer; alternatively they can make herbs, nets, meat, arrows, and other items instead) and must sneak around towns and employ tactics such as throwing money bags and bee nests to distract enemies, whistling, throwing stones and nets, etc. Towards the end of the game, though, missions tend to involve Little John (a beefed up strong merry) knocking out enemies left and right while Friar Tuck (or Stutely) ties them up for Little John to deposit them in the nearest building. This makes the last missions more of a grind than anything else.

The game also leads you to believe knocking out and tying up enemies is preferable to killing them by giving you an overall  percentage of kills after each mission. I didn’t see any difference in finishing the game by killing or not killing enemies (my percentage was around 85% non-kills) and having to tow people into buildings takes up a lot of time in the game with no real benefit (other than not alerting other guards or allowing other guards to free soldiers who are tied up, which is another reason possibly to just kill enemies). Finally, in a couple of missions where you have to take over towns and receive help from friendly troops, your “friends” kill enemy troops whenever possible, even those you tied up. With this in mind, what is the point of not killing enemies?

Here are some other tips for playing: with the 3 defensive missions try to send merry men to produce blazons instead of paying or going on the missions (3 merry men equal 1 blazon). By the end of the game you will have more merry men than you need and even have maxed out supplies of items (the most important of which to produce are herbs, arrows, and meat). Try to send Friar Tuck to be a distraction later in the game when you have him as he can heal himself by eating meat (he can carry 6) so he won’t use herbs. It took me a while to figure out how to eat meat but what you do is press the key to select the action; this puts OK on the screen, then click once and wait a few seconds for him to eat the meat. This is the same method you use for Maid Marian’s spying skill (very useful for identifying shaded enemies). After you get Maid Marian take her and the aggressive merry for a lot of healing (she can carry up to 12 herbs). In most battles between Robin and an important enemy (like the Sheriff) Robin can retreat from the battle and get healed if necessary, then rejoin the battle. Furthermore, on the second to last mission where you take York I think, you can send merry men for blazons (you may have been able to do this on the other attack mission but I didn’t try it). By getting about 5 blazons (whatever was the max) before the mission, I actually finished the mission without taking over the whole town because I earned enough blazons before that. Finally, after you collect the $100,000 gold to ransom the king, don’t bother with ambush missions anymore.

The only bug I encountered was when Robin overhears the Prince at the end of one of the last missions tell someone to take a letter saying he will not pay the king’s ransom. Then you are supposed to fight the letter delivery man after the Prince leaves. In my game, the game did not return control of the characters to me after the cut scene and I had to use a cheat code to end the mission. There is also a pretty good walkthrough on gamefaqs.com.

I enjoyed this game for the most part, but by the end I grew a little tired of the grind of knocking out, tying up, and hiding dozens of soldiers each mission. If you are looking for a strategy game that’s little different, give Robin Hood a try.

I finished playing Icewind Dale (IW) and its expansion Heart of Winter recently. IW uses Bioware’s infinity engine like Baldur’s Gate (BG). But IW, while good does not have the story depth or character development of BG. That is not to say that IW is not a good game in its own right.

In IW you create a party of up to 6 characters. You will want at least 3 fighter types but also a couple of healers and wizards, so plan on dual and / or multi-classing. Regular fighters are good because they can be skilled more than 2x in one weapon which gives them many attacks. I also liked having both a cleric and a druid since druids have many offensive spells in addition to healing. Magic users who can summon creatures are very helpful as well.

The story in the main game is okay with some interesting twists here and there and lots of subplots and boss battles along the way; the expansion’s story, while not bad is not great. The action and variety of enemies is nice though. Being in a cold environment you fight many new creatures different from the BG games.  The spells available are also include some different ones from BG; there are many unique weapons as well, but many are available for purchase once you have a lot of money.

While IW had lots of gameplay, Heart of Winter (HoW) was so short that people complained enough for the developers to create an additional area available with the latest patch. The only really annoying thing I can remember from IW was all of the backtracking after finishing an area to leave and the large area of the main village which made you walk quite a bit if you wanted to sell different items (which required seeing different vendors). Starting the expansion, though, was a tedious process. First, if you loaded the expansion with the main game you could access it from a house in the main town in the game. However, once you finished IW the game just ended; the only way to play the expansion is to start a new main game (again) and import your characters until you get to the town where you can access the expansion or start an expansion only game. I don’t understand why this was so difficult; I don’t think the developers thought this through. This sort of thing continues in HoW if you want to explore the new dungeon. There is a halfling you can talk to in the tavern of the starting village who takes you to the new dungeon, but if you finish the expansion first before going with him (like I did) you can’t get back to him unless you start another expansion game since the expansion ends after you beat the final boss.

A goofy thing that happened when I imported my characters into the HoW is that they lost all gem bags, scroll cases, and potion cases as well as anything that was in them. HoW had some other weird aspects such as subplots which one could easily skip if one did not talk to certain characters in the starting village at certain points in the game or go back to the village right before the final area (which is not necessary). I didn’t understand this and thought the developers could have done a better job moving you to where you needed to go to enjoy these subplots.

Overall I think IW is worth playing; I thought it was long and enjoyable with a decent story. HoW is just okay; there are some new tough creatures to fight and you rise a little higher in level, but don’t expect the length or amount of fun that you had in IW. Either way I recommend Dan Simpson’s excellent walkthrough for IW and HoW.

Another oldie but goody, BG2 is the sequel to BG and its expansion (if you played it). If you play through BG2 Shadows of Amn and BG 2’s expansion Throne of Bhaal your party will reach super high levels 20-30+ with some special cool new powers in the expansion. I found BG2:SOA very fun to play. It had a good plot, good development with tons and tons of quests in the beginning of the game and less areas to explore compared to BG. You also could do neat things like obtain your own base (which one depended on your class) and many BG NPCs made appearances (dead or alive, sometimes alive then dead real quick). The battles in BG2:SOA were fun and you really were able to cast a nice variety of spells and found many cool new weapons. The areas to explore were also interesting and you could even join the good or evil side in the beginning of the game depending on how you played your party.

I loaded BG2:TOB with BG2 so I received the nice additions including holding TAB to see all items on the ground.  The expansion also began immediately after I finished BG2:SOA. Another thing loading the expansion adds is the area Watcher’s Keep to BG2:SOA. I think this is best left for after you begin the expansion as it is very tough. I thought, though, that Watcher’s Keep was the best part of TOB. The rest of the expansion, especially from the middle to the end feels like one huge boss battle after another. You have to go through 5 serious boss battles in TOB but the first and fourth are a lot less difficult than the other 3. These 3 tough battles were very long as well taking 15-20 minutes in some cases because of how many enemies you had to fight through. Another cool addition in the expansion is the ability to combine more pieces and weapons into super weapons. You could do a few of these in BG2:SOA, but your demon helper in your pocket plane in TOB can do a great many combinations. Many of these weapons are quite useful to your party as well. In short, if you played BG and enjoyed it, you will like BG2 even more (it even has a real expansion compared to BG).

Finally I want to give a big shout out to Dan Simpson for writing such a great walkthrough  for BG2. I usually refer to Gamespot guides for many games (although I think they make less now than they used to), but the one for BG2:SOA was a joke. I quit using it in the beginning of SOA when you reach the town because the guide didn’t cover probably 90% of the quests available. Sure these quests weren’t required, but how do you expect to get all of the powerful items and experience for your party if you don’t pursue these quests? Anyway, Mr. Simpson’s guide was great and very helpful. I also picked up his guide for IceWind Dale (I figured I’d keep playing these infinity engine games all together). Look for Mr. Simpson’s BG2 FAQ and other FAQs on Gamefaqs.com under DSimpson.