Producer: Lothlorien
Memory Required: 48K
Retail Price: £6.95
Author: R. Packer & T. Kitchener

I've not had many kind words to say about Lothlorien in the past, so I would not have minded being able to say something nice about them now. Sadly, I can't. This is a game based on the Battle of the Bulge in 1944 - you have to prevent the Germans from capturing your fuel dumps, and thus moving on to capture Antwerp. The game kicks off with twelve text screens of how to play the game, what really happened, etc. The map that comes up is a 'true' geographical representation of the Ardennes; in the usual wargame fashion it operates not with cursor, but with map references to define objective points. I wish people would stop using these map reference things - they are imprecise, hard on the eyes, and generally make games look old-fashioned and cruddy, like Battleships or something. Having said that, the map in Panzer Attack is definitely better than their usual standard: but it's still next to impossible to see what is going on. There are some nice touches in the game, the fact that the intelligence that you receive is not always correct; but there are also some horrible touches, such as the way the reports come up going beep beep bip bip beep like Morse Code.

To sum up, Panzer Attack gave me a headache, but then since I've been demonstrating computer games non-stop for a week, it's not at all surprising.

MICRO: Spectrum 48K
PRICE: £5.95
FORMAT: Cassette
SUPPLIER: MC Lothlorien, 56A Park Lane, Poynton, Cheshire SK12 1AE

Now to a home grown product, M.C. Lothlorien's Panzer Attack for the Spectrum. This is another game that you could just about reproduce using the Combat Leader system, if you stretch your imagination slightly. Its main difference is that it represents the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes in 1944, a slight increase of scale over that of Combat Leader. As the Allies your task is to prevent the Germans from overrunning Antwerp. As you can define the German victory conditions there are degrees of difficulty to the game in a manner roughly equivalent to Legionnaire. But there is little else you can do to alter the scenario and, though it is a hard game to win, it nevertheless palls rather rapidly.

The map is only Spectrum screen size for a start. In these days of scrolling screens and multi-screen arcade adventures you would expect the design philosophy to have been adopted for the kind of game which has always cried out for large and variable display, the wargame.

As the Allied units and the German units always start from roughly the same positions (the Germans do vary their starting strategy somewhat) and the objectives of fuel dumps and Antwerp also remain in, the same place, the battle generally develops along the lines of its historical prototype with the Germans trying to race through the centre and the Allies flinging in division after division. Both armies are prone to run out of fuel, but the Allies cannot use their own fuel dumps!

This is a laudable game from Lothlorien, especially considering some of their earlier efforts, but it falls into the trap well known to boardgame and tabletop wargamers of sticking too rigidly to the historical scenario. Whilst it is certainly true that the point of a wargame is accurately to represent a particular historical conflict it is also true that a game which is always the same as that conflict will be pretty boring. Wargaming is much more interesting when it covers the 'what if?'s of history what if it had not rained the night before Waterloo, what if Washington had not crossed the Delaware, what if Richard III had not fallen off his horse and so on.

Control in Panzer Attack is similar to Combat Leader. Press a number for the army to receive orders. Press another key to give the order. As with all real time games, player panic results from inefficiency in the control system. So Panzer Leader's slowness in responding to orders is extremely frustrating. The Spectrum 48K has a notoriously poor keyboard (or at least for those of us saddled with last year's technology) but Lothlorien seem to poll the keyboard very infrequently so you sometimes have to press a key four or five times before getting a response.

The copy I had to review was an early version, and Lothlorien has apparently tightened up the game. Even with the faults, it is quite a good little game. I enjoyed playing it despite the problems, but then I didn't have to pay for it. If you are desperate for an Ardennes simulation and you only want the standard historical scenario you can probably put up with the disappointing control system.

Lothlorien, and other British companies, really should be working along the lines of Combat Leader for the Spectrum. It is about time our home grown machines had wargames software to match them. Software houses complain that the market is too small to justify the Research and Development, but (as the Lords of Midnight series shows) good R and D can create its own market and a wargame of the standard of. Combat Leader for the Spectrum will sell well.