Game Review: Feud (Commodore 64, Bulldog)

Feud is the tale of Learic and Leanoric, are two feuding wizard brothers, who have lived in the village of Little Dullford for so many years, that none of the locals can remember when they turned up there.  In fact, the story for the game does all of that, with you imagining it being spoken in a West Country accent to really give the story its weight.  You play Learic, and are out to effectively get all the spells you need so that you can battle your rival brother wizard Leanoric, in a battle to the death.  All of this and the thought of creating your own magic spells sounds somewhat promising, as does the loading screen by Ste Pickford which precedes the game.

Ingredients

The game loads with a nice David Whittaker tune on the title screen, with an extended version of that plays throughout the game, and although the title screen is basic, the scrolling message also shows you the herbs in Hieke’s herb garden, which you must locate and be able to mix in your cauldron.  This is useful as you can work out the location of each herb as you go.  You also start in the top left-hand corner of the map with the cauldron close by.  This is where you need to bring your ingredients to mix them into the relevant spells for use.

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

The herb gardens that you explore are effectively a reasonable sized map, with small streams to cross by a bridge, walled paths to work a way in or around, and other characters such as the gardener making their way around the garden too.  The key here when you start is to locate as many herbs as possible whilst avoiding Leonaric.  There is a compass to the bottom right which normally should show his whereabouts.  However, due to the first of many bugs in the game, the movement of Leanoric can be random – one minute he will be to the right, the next, several screens to the left, and not enough thought was put in to at least make the movement sensible and reliable so you would know when to avoid him.

Anger Is an Energy

The two wizards are depicted as figures of themselves in the energy bar, sinking as they reduce until the tombstone RIP symbol appears, where it is game over.  The status bar also tends to crash a little bit if you accidentally press the space bar during play with two rows appearing corrupted.  Your spells when correctly cast can indeed reduce Leonaric’s strength well, but so it appears can some of the other characters if that wizard runs into them – so much so, that you can win the game that way without destroying Leonaric yourself.  That is a fatal flaw, in that you would like to be able to have cast the right spells yourself and had the satisfaction of winning.

Mixing It Up

When you collect an ingredient, the spell book shows the spell with the ingredient collected in black text.  Once you have both ingredients, and you want to make the spell, you head back to your cauldron (top left of the map), select the spell book, and then press fire to mix the spell.  The spell itself will show in black meaning it is ready for use.  Each of the spells requires two ingredients and all of them are herbs apart from one which is bones instead.  They are scattered amongst the herb garden, but do not automatically get picked up, you must press up and fire together over them to collect them, which can be confusing at first.

Cast No Shadow

Unfortunately, it is when you cast certain spells that you will encounter more bugs in the game.  Casting the lightning spell should result in the bolt of lightning shooting out from you, but due to the screen location not being correctly referenced, if on the right of the screen the lightning can be at the far left, and vice versa, which is poor.  Even worse is to come if you get the ingredients for the sprites spell and cast that – Learic sinks to the ground for some strange reason, and the game has completely crashed.  The game can also crash if you accidentally press the RESTORE key, thinking you might use this to exit the game to the title screen, it locks up entirely meaning a reload of the cassette.

Just Buggin’

There are also additional bugs not yet mentioned too.  Not only can Leanoric die at random when encountering enemies, so can you without any reason whatsoever.  The end screen which shows your total score can sometimes have bad graphics in place of the space character, and when casting some of the spells, the ingredients used up are not always the two ingredients used to make the spell in the first place, meaning you lose the ability to cast different spells.   The status screen at the bottom can also show some corrupted graphics too – the end of the Leanoric scroll shows the letter F in red in that backdrop instead.  That should have been spotted earlier.

Graphics and Sound

The graphics in Feud are reasonable with the wizards being depicted nicely, and the backdrops neatly drawn with some good depictions of the bridge over the stream, the huts by the cauldrons, and the garden herbs themselves.  The loading screen by Ste Pickford translates well from the Amstrad version, and characters are reasonably well animated.  The music by David Whittaker might seem repetitive at first but develops into a decent little tune to play along to, especially during the gameplay itself.  The sound effects are minimal at best, however.

Final Thoughts

I really wanted to like Feud, especially as the option to collect the spells and then cast them against your enemy wizard sounds all like a good idea.  Like all good ideas, it needed execution and this version is very sadly lacking in that department.  The basic gameplay is there, but the random movement of Leanoric does not help matters.  What really does irk is the fact that the testing of the game was not there, and the numerous bugs that are in the game as was released spoil the gameplay to the point that you would just give up and switch off.  What it did show was that if you do not play test a game properly and release it, when people find the bugs and it becomes known, word of mouth soon would spread as to not to buy this game.  Play the Spectrum or Amstrad versions of this instead – they are much better.

It is worth mentioning that in 2017, there was a bug fixed version of the game released. This fixed all the bugs mentioned in this review (apart from the random movement of Leanoric) and at least made the gameplay experience far more enjoyable to play.  If this version had been released back in 1987, the game would have scored higher.

More details on this version here – https://csdb.dk/release/?id=157388&show=summary#summary

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