Game Review: The Curse of Sherwood, (ZX Spectrum, Mastertronic)

Setting The Scene with a Blood-Stained Parchment

When reading the inlay instructions for the game, it is clear from the outset that Sherwood Forest has been taken over by an evil cult, instilling fear into the forest dwellers.  So, are there any clues on how to possibly rid the cult and bring back normality?  Well yes, and it turns out that fortunately there possibly is.  On a blood-stained parchment left on the slain Bishop of Derby’s body (after failing to carry out an exorcism), there was a sixteen-line rhyme pinned to his body.  Follow the clues and destroy the source of evil!

Presentation

There is no loading screen.  It’s literally Program: COS followed by Bytes: COS.  Although that saves time, I always preferred games with a loading screen myself.

If no keys are pressed on the main menu screen for approximately ten seconds, you will see five screens that appear in the game.  The screens aren’t random but act as a short demo attract mode, which I always feel improves the presentation.

Playability

Moving around the forest isn’t too bad an experience on some the less animated screens.  You will notice however, that when there is quite a lot happening all at once, the game does suffer slightly from lagging.  Sometimes there can be a bit of frustration when entering a new screen and I tended to find this more when walking either up into or down a screen rather than sideways.  The reason being is that you can only fire left or right and sometimes feel like its pot luck.

What I did like about the aiming from the enemies is that not everything they aim or throw goes in a straight line.  This means moving around takes a bit of skill and doesn’t just mean moving up or down to avoid things.  The collision detection is good so you can walk without any nasty surprises!  If you lose a life, you know it’s not because you’ve been cheated by hitting something incorrectly.  Always a plus….

If you do find yourself in a bit of a pickle, you can walk out of the screen and return back.  If you’ve shot everything and go back into the screen, the screen stays empty.  If you’re getting surrounded, you always move of the screen as an escape mechanism.  The enemies do however sometimes face the wrong way and fire in the opposite direction!

Graphics

The graphics are neatly drawn with plenty of colour.  Pleasingly, colour clash is kept at a bare minimum and in no way ruined my enjoyment of playing Curse of Sherwood.

One nice effect that I liked was when walking into a ring of blue stones.  Standing near the middle of this ring makes you start to gradually vanish and teleport into another area.  You will then start to reappear gradually again. Worthy of merit, when you do lose a life, you do turn into a heap of a skull and crossbones.  That animation has been done well too.

Sound Effects only but No Music

There is no music at all at any stage so, it is purely sound effects only throughout the entire game.  There are tip-taps as you walk around and short noises when you pick up and items, shoot or lose a life.

Whatever You Do, Don’t Press Q!

The keys are not user definable and although there are a range of keys that can be used to move around, whatever you do, don’t press Q.  It is mentioned in the instructions that you quit by pressing Q but I saw no real obvious reason why you’d want to actually do that.  A few times when playing this, I did accidentally press it and was annoyingly straight back to the main menu.  There is no “Are you Sure? (Y/N)” so press Q at your peril.

The only logical reason that I can think of why that option would be there was if you were to accidently select a wrong joystick in error (Kempston or Cursor) and go back to the main menu without having to re-load the whole game again.

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You know what we think but why not share your thoughts on this game! Let us know what you think of it in the comments below, or add your own score using the slider in the summary box at the top of the review!

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