Game Review: Camelot Warriors (ZX Spectrum, Mastertronic)

The Storyline

In Camelot Warriors, you must travel through four worlds and destroy each Guardian with the four elements scattered around each world.  The worlds are The Woods, The Caverns, The Lake and The Castle of Camelot and the Guardians to each world are:

• Aznaht – Lord of The Druid’s
• Kindo – King of The Lake
• Azornic – Lord of The Caverns
• Arthur – King of Camelot

Each guardian needs a certain element to kill them which are:

• The Voice from Another World
• The Mirror of Wisdom
• The Elixor of Life
• The Unburning Fire

These are not in the order that you need them, but you do have to use the element to progress onto the next world.

Graphics

After a reasonable loading screen (strangely it doesn’t mention Camelot Warriors), it must be said that the game’s main strong point really is it’s imaginative and colourful graphics.

The animation when you are walking along is neat with three frames as you stroll along.  Pressing down the fire button, puts your sword into a frame of getting ready to aim and releasing the fire button take a swing.  There is a bit of flicker whilst you finish this move though on your character.

Although the jump animation doesn’t look too great (it looks a bit wooden and static), the falling downwards frame look very good.  When you land, you see you character bend down to take the impact of, before standing up.  Animation on the cauldron next to the wizard also has the bubbling effect too, very nicely done indeed.  Amusingly, after The Unburning Fire element by the Cauldron to kill one of the guardians, you turn into a frog.  The bobbing up and leaping are very good and make the game more fun.

To my surprise, the third screen (and others after it through out the game) had an unexpected twist, with horizontal scrolling screens.  When you walked a short way onto the screen, it starts moving left or right, depending on which way you are facing or jumping.  Noticeably though, your feet changed colour to that of the alien running along the floor, even if you weren’t anywhere near it at times.

No Score or Lives Display

You begin the game with five lives and unlike most other games, you don’t see how many points you have score or how many lives you have whilst playing the main game.

In fact, you don’t score any points at all and the only time you will see the remaining lives are after losing one and pressing any key to resume.

Strike It Lucky!

Although the controls and responsive, timing is pretty much essential.  You’ll see this when the very first attacks you at the start.  Striking with your sword is literally hit and miss (pardon the pun) and you can easily mis-time a sword slash and mistime your aim.

The playability is rather challenging and not always the players’ fault when losing a life.  I feel this rather down the design of Camelot Warriors.  Just like in Jet Set Willy, the way you entered a room could mean that if you lost a life, you could end up them all.  The way you enter the screen repeats if you lose a life and this happened when jumping into a room and landing on an enemy to only keep repeating itself, then zap, there goes another life.

Entering rooms in the wrong order can also result in not being able to escape.  For example, falling down the fourth screen without collecting The Unburning Fire to put the cauldron out means that you can’t get back up the levels.

You cannot crouch down and swing a sword, which may have added another depth to the game play but one thing to note is that you do not lose a life by falling down a long way from height.

Sound

After a short presentation at the beginning, a tune starts.  This gives off an Olde Worlde Medieval feel and gradually increases in pitch and lasting around twenty seconds.  It’s not bad.

When walking you will hear foot-stepping taps and if you collide with an enemy, you’ll hear a high-pitched zap sound.

Falling into water produces short beeps as you sink down and drown.

Flippy Side

This game is a Flippy release meaning that both the Spectrum and Amstrad versions are on the same cassette.  One side for the Spectrum and the other the Amstrad computers.  Obviously, an even bigger bargain if you owned both machines.

Just for clarity, this review is purely written for the ZX Spectrum version only.

Point of Interests – Spectrum 48K Mode Only

There are very few games that weren’t 100% compatible on a 128K Spectrum.  The instructions state that you must put your machine in 48K mode.  This did work fine and naturally, I did also load the game 128K mode, just to see what happened.  The outcome was corrupt graphics.

Camelot Warriors was also released in Spain under the software house, Dinamic.  My Mastertronic tape, does however have Ricochet printed across it.  Although I can’t confirm this, my thoughts are that (possibly) Mastertronic were going to consider it as a Ricochet release?  This would have made some sense being that it is effectively a re-released game.  Would be interesting to know…

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