Let's Replay Stonekeep #05: Clearing the Second Floor
238The combat system of the game is in many ways quite good, doing a great job of conveying how quick and frantic combat is. Enemies use tactics and consumable items to their advantage and will attack at range to try and soften you up. Caught unprepared, you're in serious danger of taking a lot of damage or dying. This threat doesn't lessen as you head further down, though combat gets a little easier when you gain more weapon skills and additional health.
Unfortunately, the combat system in Stonekeep has some inherent flaws, large ones. First, enemies have certain areas that they 'patrol' and won't stray out of them. This means that if you can figure out where a foe won't go, you're free to pelt them with ranged attacks until they run away or lie, most likely the latter. Second, ammunition can be thrown as a missile weapon and is capable of dealing large amounts of damage. For rocks this is understandable but for arrows, not so much. Arrows are going to be our most deadly tool for a long time and they never break, meaning that we can often quite safely kill dangerous threats.
Finally, you can take advantage of time pausing when you check your inventory to throw multiple projectiles in rapid succession, unleashing a devastating torrent of arrow-based doom upon your foes. In general I've found that 90's dungeon crawlers struggled with balancing thrown weapons, either making them wholly ineffective or absurdly too powerful. In Stonekeep's case it's unfortunately the latter and to the games detriment. This is somewhat countered by the fact that it can get quite hard at times, almost requiring you to take advantage of these flaws unless you want to constantly backtrack to healing fountains.
As a case for how powerful the arrows in this game are, let's see how good they are at finishing off the rest of the sharga on this floor. The answer to how effective they are may not surprise you.
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