Back in the early 2000s, my college roommate and I raided the bargain bin at a local shop and came away with a few interesting DOS/Win9x games. One of them was Albion.
I’ve attempted it a few times over the years but never managed to finish it. I like that it alternates between overhead and first-person perspectives, a bit like early Ultima or Phantasy Star games, but with VGA graphics and Wolfenstein 3D era first person rendering.
I think there are a few areas of friction that have kept me from completing the game:
– suffers from the CRPG trope of throwing tons of useless items at you and forcing you to figure out which ones are worth picking up / buying
– some of the level design is confusing, resulting in my wandering around in circles looking for where to go
– suffers from the CRPG trope of cities being full of dialogue text, which adds flavor but saps my feeling of momentum
I definitely recommend it for fans of CRPGs though, as it’s unique.
A few technical/gameplay notes:
– this is a late 32-bit DOS era game that came on CD-ROM and has digitized sounds and General MIDI / OPL music
– some versions of DOSBox suffer from a reversed stereo issue with the digitized sounds. DOSBox-X works fine and can be launched from DOSBox Game Launcher. Not sure about the GOG version since I don’t own it there
– like Betrayal at Krondor, the FoV in the 3D sections hasn’t aged well; also like B@K, Albion offers a map which can help provide a better idea of what the area is supposed to look like
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