Iron & Blood: Warriors of Ravenloft Retrospective

When encountering a game with Ravenloft in its title, you would generally expect it to be an RPG or a dungeon crawler of some description. Iron & Blood: Warriors of Ravenloft, however, is an obscure D&D fighting game from back in 1996. And according to this Destructoid retrospective, it’s not a very good one.

Here’s a couple of paragraphs to give you a taste of what to expect:

Let me tell you something: I’ve read the entire manual, and I still don’t get most of the mechanics. I went into training mode to see if it was a tutorial, but instead, I was faced with a mystery. The AI doesn’t just act like a dummy that you can practice your hit while down attack. It’s completely just a normal fight. One that you can lose. There’s no move list for you to try out. I’m not even sure why it’s a separate mode.

But there are some mechanics that are just completely baffling. I was trying to figure out what was up with artifacts, so I checked the instruction manual and found that they can be toggled in the options menu. Can they? There’s no option there, and the spot where it should be according to the manual is instead taken up by Auto Save.