Reviews

Squandering a license by turning out a largely unrelated, substandard product is a grand gaming tradtion, and one that Activision firmly adhered to in bringing ITV's top Chromakey roleplaying laffs to the Spectrum. Given the TV show was inspired by Atic Atac and Dragontorc/Avalon, it might seem logical to bring Knightmare to home computers, but in failing to address what was unique about the show, the programmers turned in garbled nonsense.

In the show, the hero is blindfolded and must be guided through a dungeon by his team, using their wits and brains to solve the puzzles and games that lie in their path. In the game, conversely, the hero runs around a dungeon throwing bricks at ghosts. Everything about the game exhibits a "Will this do?" attitude. The famous lifetimer of the show is represented by... a candle. This title is currently distribution denied. Long may that continue.

This arcade adventure is based on a British TV show which as far as I know was never seen in other countries (well, in Italy not for sure), so I can't judge how well its spirit has been translated into this digital incarnation.

However, it's a pretty average game, with monochrome but rather detailed graphics and almost no sound even on the 128K. Puzzles are somewhat obscure but the amount of items and characters you can interact with is limited, and that makes your task - getting out of the castle - a little easier. Cryptic clues are given by two oracles, but one of them is evil and will try to divert you from your path - however it won't be hard to understand who's who, so to speak.

Sometimes you have to throw rocks or fight with enemies, and since all commands are issued with a rolling verb/noun input it could be very difficult to deal with them. A keyboard shortcut would have been better.

Not bad, but not great either. Arcade adventurers will appreciate it, other kinds of players can move along.

Hear that music? That is supposed to be one of the greatest theme songs of all-time and it is utterly butchered. And as far as TV show based games go, this is among the very worst in that it has absolutely nothing to do with the show whatsoever. If you hadn't seen the show before you'd think this as another dungeon crawler adventure type game, but if you did, and more importantly if you loved the show, you will know that this doesn't follow any of its look and feel in any way shape or form. You are to go around and do certain things in order to progress, no THEY are to tell YOU what to do because you can't see a thing anyway! Given that Knightmare was inspired by two Spectrum games, Atic Atac and Dragontorc, you would think that they would have added elements of those games to make this game stand out, but nooo instead we get a shitty dungeon crawler type game with a rubbish control system and had no faithful following to the show at all. And there's a candle as a timer for some reason, no comment. This is nothing more than an insult to Knightmare fans. This was one TV show conversion they shouldn't have bothered with.