Lone Wolf 15… kind of a bore

Tonight is my third evening playing Lone Wolf 15, The Darke Crusade.

Honestly, I think I’m over the whole Lone Wolf series by now.

They’ve become repetitive, with the same enemies and scenarios and the same ongoing war after 24 years.

The writing is lazy, with so many sections that do literally nothing at all except repeat the same as the other choice, just to fill space. And they didn’t flesh out 250 pages even with that sort of egregious filler.

It seems like they weren’t even proofreading the books anymore, by this point. Buildings are “raised” to the ground, and Lone Wolf is a “Somleading” By itself I would shrug off a simple typo, but combined with the same tired world and lazy writing, well… it doesn’t feel like Joe was really giving it his all.

The Lone Wolf series started off strong. I still remember Flight From the Dark as being a harrowing tale of hiding and of being hunted, and Shadow on the Sand as being lost in a foreign land and hearing tell of super Kai powers beyond what we thought possible. But by Prisoners of Time (book 11) the book’s map was just a straight line, where a choice only involve taking 2 damage before going to the same page as your other option anyway.

Well, we’ll always have the original Kai series. Those were good stuff.

And beckoning from the shelf is The World of Lone Wolf, a four-book series about Grey Star the Wizard, written by someone other than Joe Dever but with Joe as the editor. I’ve had those for a couple of years now, let’s blow off the dust and see what’s inside…