After Krondor proved to be a slow burn success for Dynamix and Sierra, they naturally wanted to make a sequel; unfortunately by the time the game had turned a profit they no longer had the rights to the Riftwar saga, and instead had to make their own. A pretty stock fantasy world called Ramar, with some equally tepid writing by Susan Frischer and Peter Sarrett; neither of whom worked on the original game, and the quality from it is sorely missed. Our first scene is literally a prince and a young farmhand uniting, with the latter tossing out a lightning bolt out of the blue to showcase his magical talent; yes, I understand compelling world building is difficult, but surely you can try harder than this. We've also got voice acting now (of a very mediocre sort) and the game isn't much better looking than Krondor was, despite coming out four years later.
Aside from a few small changes and improvements, this is basically just a bog-standard retread of Krondor in every respect. Instead of the word-lock chests you now get lever chests, in which you pull a series of levers in the correct order to spell out the word for the puzzle. There are also bead chests in which you attempt to create a sequence of colored beads through exchanges, though these are largely superfluous changes. Lockpicking is now luck based (blah), and combat was used relatively sparingly in Krondor, making each battle feel significant; here it feels like blatant, boring filler as you're fighting the same handful of enemies almost constantly everywhere you go. Spells are no longer learned through scrolls, but must be "researched" before they can be used, with new types found through certain environmental actions and research carried out very slowly as time passes. On the upside, the game does autosave before battles in case they go wrong (and they will, a lot), and there are now touch-range spells, so you're not stuck if an enemy bum-rushes your mage (which they will, a lot). Unfortunately the lackluster writing, dragging combat and overall slow pace make this a poor imitation of Krondor, and definitely not as good as that classic. To say nothing of the bugs - the game crashes frequently and many mechanics simply don't work as advertised. Krondor was a virtually bug-free experience, so having so many bugs and crashes in what's supposed to be a followup game is a major strike against it. And considering how subpar an experience it is already, there's just no reason to recommend Antara over its predecessor.
Publisher: Sierra On-Line
Released: 1997
Platforms: PC