Heroes of the Lance is not as terrible as I initially thought. Actually kinda decent for a very early attempt at an Action-RPG dungeon crawler, but it's unintuitive and clunky in both its combat and action elements in general.

You control a party of eight premade adventurers who need to challenge a big dungeon to find some magic discs at the bottom. Only the character you place at the front of your party appears on the screen and is directly controlled by you at a given time, but everybody can take damage from, say, a boulder trap dropping on your head. The game doesn't move very fast but you can be killed quickly by enemies since it doesn't take many hits for even your strongest fighters to get murdered.

Everything takes place on a side-scrolling 2D plane, but you can press your designated "up" or "down" keys to enter doors/tunnels in the background and foreground of a screen. Your characters with ranged martial weapons like bows and slings can attack from afar, but once you're close enough to an enemy you get switched to a "Combat" mode that changes your controls to a melee fighting style. By the way, this game was intended to be played with either a classic joystick or the number pad keys on your keyboard, so that's how movement and fighting are handled. I don't have a joystick, so numpad was how I went along.

In melee range you can aim your weapons upward, straight ahead, or at the enemy's feet. On the numpad this corresponds to using 9, 6, or 3, respectively, if you're attacking towards the right side of the screen. 7, 4, or 1 are used instead if you're facing the left side of the screen. You press the Enter key while holding one of these aiming keys to execute an attack. None of this aiming really matters too much, except that some characters' weapons have hitboxes that hit more readily when aimed at one spot over another. Moreover, this game's combat mostly operates on a dice roll system, even though it's occurring in real-time. This is something that early Elder Scrolls games like Daggerfall and particularly Morrowind would do years later.

Basically, you just keep swinging at the enemy and hope that you get enough confirmed hits on them before they do the same to you. At first, I thought the combat was bullshit because you die so quickly and enemies can keep moving in and out of your attack range while crapping on me when I'd try to outmaneuver them in the same way. That alone helped me understand why so many people think this game sucks. But then I found some random tips online that suggested keeping the mage and cleric in the first four spaces of my party without putting them at the very front.

This allows you to still use their spells by opening the menu and invoking them from the spell lists, but without directly risking their safety. The mage and cleric both have useful spells that can paralyze or put most enemies to sleep, so I'd just stun the more annoying enemies and cut them in half with whichever warrior character I wanted to use. The dwarf is pretty good since he's short and can fight other dwarves on even ground while being kind of annoying for taller enemies to hit.

Using the cheesy/smart spell approach, I made progress readily. Like most classic dungeon crawls, the whole place is a maze that you'd ideally map out on paper since the game doesn't give you an in-game map. There's hidden traps (your halfling party member can automatically detect and disarm most of these if you let him lead the party) and treasure to find, like you'd expect. Then I ran into a couple of new problems that convinced me to move on from this game for now.

First, I got into a section of the dungeon where the only way to continue was to cross a bottomless pit. You can make your characters do a running jump in this game, but the positioning requirements ended up being very picky for this pit, so almost everybody died in my multiple failed attempts to jump across it. I could've saved before the first attempt and reloaded until I succeeded, but I didn't care that much about being optimal. I think the dwarf actually may have a longer running jump than the other characters, or I could've just finally gotten the jump correct when it was his turn. Either way, the controls for this action layer of movement and combat isn't the most responsive and feels surprisingly punishing in how precise your positioning is expected to be.

Second, I ran into some kind of tough dragon enemy soon after that I could barely harm. The dragon was apparently immune to every spell my mage and cleric could throw at it. The mage was completely useless and the cleric could only heal my dwarf and provide a defensive barrier specifically named "Resist Dragon Breath," which seemed to negate or at least greatly reduce the dragon's attack damage. Possibly due to my dwarf being a little guy (and my only remaining warrior), he could barely land an attack on the dragon, which would constantly shimmy back and forth to avoid my swings and then pelt me with damage. If I kept pursuing the dragon and healing I suppose it would've eventually been trapped by a wall or pit and unable to dodge me, but then my cleric's staff ran out of power to cast spells. I kind of expected there to be a spell limit, but I figured it would be a pretty high one since the game doesn't tell you how many spells you have remaining and there doesn't appear to be a way to rest and recover the spells. The dragon soon killed my dwarf and his two cheerleaders.

That seemed like a good place to quit. I don't mind most of the challenge since I had a decent strategy going, but I think I either ended up basically softlocked since my other warriors died to the pit and I couldn't hit the dragon effectively or sustain battle with it long enough to trap it. This isn't a great game, but I see the vision and it's kind of a cool one for the era. Clunky and annoying to control, though, and feels like you're supposed to counter the enemies' ability to cheese you in battle with cheese of your own. Neat concept that I think other games have adapted most of the positives of in better ways over the decades since.