This book is half game and half novel. It takes the form of a medieval, sword and sorcery adventure in a fantasy world. The book can't be read from front to back, like a conventional story, but is arranged into 400 separate references that all have different options.

You jump from reference number to reference number, depending on what options you wish to choose, thus creating your own, unique, adventure where you effectively select your own path through the book each time. This is very entertaining and an original idea that can lead to different outcomes upon multiple readings of the same book.

The Warlock of Firetop Mountain takes place in a fantasy land called Allansia. You play the role of a swordsman hero, charged with the dangerous missions of slaying an evil wizard called Zagor. However, your adventure takes you deep into the subterranean caverns of his lair; Firetop Mountain.

This is a great adventure game book. You have to navigate a complex, underground maze system within the rock of a mountain to reach your goal. There are other objects that you must collect during your quest too if you're to be successful overall, as killing the tyrannical warlock is only half of it. However, I won't reveal the other aspects of the adventure here, so I won't spoil it for the first time reader.

The maze is great fun to explore and investigate, making a map with a pencil and paper is well recommended too. When I first played it, I got hopelessly lost within Zagor's complex labyrinth as it all looks so similar that you tend to end up going in circles around the tunnels without even realising it.

Firetop Mountain is also full of lots of nasty traps, tricks and monsters. As you adventure around, flicking from reference number to reference number, you have to avoid traps, fight hostile creatures via an ingenious combat system that involves the use of dice and find and collect various artefacts that will be useful of even vital to completing you mission later on.

Altogether, Warlock of Firetop Mountain is a great Fighting Fantasy game book adventure. A solid underground dungeon adventure with plenty of things to keep you interested. It's also quite hard to finish successfully and will probably require multiple attempts before you manage to destroy the warlock and grab his treasure for yourself. But the effort is worth it.

This is a cool game book in the series. The first one that started the whole craze and is definitely worth buying and playing on a dark, rainy, overcast weekend, as it'll get you in the mood for some hazardous cave exploring.

Acquire, read and enjoy; it's a classic of Fighting Fantasy.

If you haven't bought any Fighting Fantasy book yet, then do. And buy this one first.

However, if instead you're someone who's a fan of the series but never read this book, I suggest you save your money and perhaps borrow it from a friend. This is the first book of the Fighting Fantasy series and, without rose-tinted glasses, it shows.

Firstly there's no real plot. The objective is to slay a warlock and take his treasure. Except that it never tells you any "evil deeds" the warlock has done, or where the treasure came from. You aren't described as the hero or the villain of the adventure - you're just there to, err, win.

Secondly, a great number of references in the book comprise of the "classic" direction choice (i.e. do you wish to go North, South, East or West?) that I find quite boring. Later (better) books in the series don't use these kinds of references at all.

Thirdly the book is very thin and that's for a reason; it's not a very descriptive book at all.

Finally, while the illustrations are of a good quality, there's one thing that annoys me about them. In almost every case, the cave and room walls are not shaded, they're just drawn as outlines. This means that a large proportion of almost all the illustrations is just the white of the paper.
Every time you get to a reference with an illustration it completely destroys your mental picture of being in a cave or even indoors.