Producer: Black Knight Computers Ltd
Retail Price: £5.95

Sword and Shield is a mediaeval strategy game concocted by the same team that brought you Seventh Cavalry. A king of somewhere lost in the mists of time has allocated control of one of his territories to you. Your orders are to make 1000 groats (local currency) from development of the crop farms. However, there are more than natural disasters to contend with. Invading knights and their infantry can cause trouble and rebellious farmers, known as the masked men, are set on making your life impossible.

A number of parameters end the game should they be exceeded. If you ever have less than thirty crops, or your own contingent of knights becomes .exhausted or you take over 200 years to reach the objective, the game ends in defeat. The only way to win is to amass the groats and avoid any of the above.

The game turns are one year long, and the player can order forces to keep the enemy at bay, send knights out to look for treasure in neighbouring castles and set the tax rate. The player can select a short or full length game and the facility to load and save unfinished ventures has been thoughtfully included.

The game isn't a purely historical saga however. BLACK KNIGHT have gone down the fantasy road by populating the wilds with up to four rather unfriendly dragons. These dragons have an inverted hibernation habit in that they only appear in the winter (though they remain in play unless dealt with). They are also the strongest of the player's possible adversaries.

Knights are a major asset - they are strong and fast, adaptable, and can conscript peasants to create infantry. At the end of the year, when treasure chests appear (for some strange reason), only the knights can venture to get them. Movement and orders for knights and others are carried out with a cursor (known as your 'shadow') and eight directional scrolling of the landscape can also be achieved with this.

At the end of the year three summary screens appear. The first is the obligatory SAVE option. The second tells you the current tax rate, the quantity of crops grown during the year, how much income has been made and the balance in your treasury. The final screen displays the number of knights, farms and infantry you have with another reminder of your balance. At convenient points in this sequence are the options to change the tax rate (arbitrarily set at 20% at the start of the game) and purchase new knights, infantry and farms. Play then continues to the next year.

Play is simple and straightforward. There's no obvious flaw in the game it's just that there isn't enough game there. The trouble with products like this is that they are immensely difficult to get anywhere with until the correct balance is found. After that, all the challenge disappears. Enter yawn mode.

If there was something of interest to look at on the screen, it might have been more bearable. As it stands, the visual aspects of the game are bland and unimaginative, with smooth scrolling being the only saving grace. The price adds insult to injury. It costs at least two pounds more than it's worth. The company probably don't have the resources to bring the game out more cheaply, but they should have gone for an improved product to justify their pricing. They stand to gain little from overpriced mediocrity.

If you're really stuck for a new strategy game, then this one will provide a challenge for a while. But play becomes as predictable and hackneyed as the plot itself before long. The game is a throwback to the days when strategists couldn't afford to be choosy. Nowadays we can, of course, and I suggest you choose to leave this one alone.

Power House
£1.99
Reviewer: Owen Bishop, Audrey Bishop

Sword & Shield is a 'real time' medieval fantasy wargame. You're the ruler over a land ravaged by rogue knights, dragons and 'masked' men. At your disposal you have your own loyal knights and infantrymen. With these you must protect the peasant farmers and their crops. Furthermore, you must balance the treasury as the seasons pass, harvests are reaped and taxes collected. The unit of currency is the 'groat' and to win you must have over 1000.

The game is played on an impressively large map, which scrolls very rapidly. Good quality '3D' graphics depict hills, trees, farms, roads and castles. However, there seems to be a fundamental mismatch between the 'time' length of the game, which is in years, and the movement of the units, which surely must only take tens of minutes. This spoils any intended realism.

The major gripe is about the instructions. They are bad! You are not told the difference between the 'Epic' and 'Short' options at the beginning of the game. The latter makes losing nearly impossible, which is odd! Also the controls are poorly explained. Use keys 5 - 8 for moving the cursor. The other cursor keys do not always work.

Included with the game is a 'free' track by the group HEX. It's okay, but rather short and somewhat irrelevant! Altogether, good graphics, but slow and a bit aimless. Still, it's worth it at the budget price.

Label: Black Knight
Price: £5.95
Memory: 48K/128K
Reviewer: Gary Rook

Sword and Shield is a fascinating wargame that looks at first glance like one of the old games that used to be hidden away in the deepest recesses of mainframe computers' memory banks.

Remember the one - you rule an area of land, and you have to grow enough food to keep your population alive, otherwise they rebel and depose you? Well, this is that, but with knobs on.

You, Duke whoever you are, have to collect over 1,000 groats from the groaning, down-trodden peasantry. To help you, you have a force of knights computer-controlled duke - and he's going to fight you for control of territory. The map is green, with rolling hills, peasant villages, woods, roads and so on marked on Also shown are forts, either yours or the enemy's. Every year, you'll be told the amount of crops grown. You tax the peasants from 10% to 90% - but the more you tax them, the more of them rebel and become bandits. By moving one of your knights next to a peasant, you can conscript him as an infantryman, but the more peasants you conscript into your army, the less are left to till the land and grow crops - and pay taxes.

You move the troops under your control by giving them a direction and telling them how fast they should move. Until you order them otherwise they continue to follow those orders - unless they run into a tree, hill etc.

When you try and occupy a square that already contains an enemy piece, a battle takes place. What happens is anybody's guess - I haven't worked out how to find out yet. There is treasure dotted about - you should try and collect this (obvious, huh?), but somehow I don't think it's going to be as easy as it looks.

What else? Oh yes, the dragons. Dragons are bad news - they eat people. You can have up to four on the map at the same time, and you really should avoid them like the plague.

At the year end, you use some of the cash you've your treasury to buy new troops, either knights or infantry. You can also buy a farm - which doesn't refer to the American euphemism for dying - but means simply that you add one agrarian smallholding to the list.

And that's it. Quite a lot of information to digest in a review, and far more to digest when trying to play the game the first couple of times. I suspect it's going to be a long time before I get anywhere near beating this thing. But at the same time. It's pretty compulsive - you always believe that next time you can do it - until you try, that is.

Any real complaints? Well, the only thing that bothers me that much is the fact that it's very difficult to tell the various pieces apart. Yes, I know that the instructions say that your troops, being good, always face to the right, but sometimes it's tough telling exactly which way a character is facing.

You can save games either to tape or to Microdrive, so you can resume a long game you've had to abandon later on. This isn't the sort of game you're likely to finish in half an hour. The final verdict is a definite thumbs up. The graphics are good, although a little unclear at times, and the gameplay works really well once you get the hang of it.