The Final Battle - Mirrorsoft RRP œ24.99
             (Mouse-driven graphic adventure)

At the end of Legend of the Sword, the first game in this series,
you and your valiant companions, after many escapades, succeeded
in defeating the evil wizard Suzar and imprisoning him in a
teardrop. All should be well with the world but, as always in
adventures, evil beings have a nasty habit of escaping from a
seemingly secure prison. Yes, Suzar has escaped and he's got the
magic sword and shield which were used to defeat him last time.
All but two of your companions have been killed and the two who
weren't killed, Pagan and Crysella, are nowhere to be seen when
you regain consciousness in a dank dungeon.

Fortunately, it isn't too hard to find a way out of the dungeon
and go looking for your two pals. On the way, you'll meet another
potential ally, a cleric called Jerub, who has some useful
information. There IS another way to defeat Suzar, using six
crystals which have (of course) been scattered about the land.

Jerub has a clue for the location of one of them but you'll have
to find the others yourself.

Legend of the Sword was a nicely presented adventure which used
both text entry and some icons with the mouse. There was on-screen
mapping if you wanted it and various other features including
excellent graphics. The Final Battle is completely mouse-driven
and the graphics, which are in isometric 3D view, are better than
its predecessor.

It takes a little while to get used to the way the game works
because a click of the right mouse button will often have a
different effect to a click of the left mouse button. For example,
a left click on the main character's picture will bring up his/her
inventory whereas a right click on it will show his/her status
screen, showing health, morale, IQ etc. A range of icons cover
actions such as LOOK, LISTEN, movement, accessing the map, the
weather, ATTACK, CONSUME and so on. Again, these are a bit
confusing at first especially as the icons used don't (to me)

always sum up exactly what they are meant to represent .... two
keys for LOOK??

There's also the general OPERATE icon which can be used to open
doors with a double-click on the main picture, use two objects
together by clicking on OPERATE then on the two objects in turn,
and, if you give a single click on OPERATE with the right button,
may give a hint if you're stuck.

One nice touch is the ability to save to RAM as well as to disk.
The game plays in real-time so I found the RAM functions very
useful. The save to disk command can be a bit picky; sometimes
the files don't seem to save which can be frustrating when you
go to load a saved position and find it isn't there! What you must
do is specify a drive when you save and restore eg give as your
save/restore name a:hall or b:hall etc. Then you won't have any
problems.

One criticism of Legend of the Sword was the poor text-checking,
which resulted in mistakes in both the spelling and grammar.
Unfortunately, The Final Battle seems to have just as many errors,
with several cases of "its" and "it's" and "your" and "you're"
being confused, a toadstool being called a "toadstall" and
"shortly" being written as "shorlty".

The game itself, though, is excellent, far better in my opinion
than Legend of the Sword which I just didn't have the persistence
to complete.  The fact that the different characters who join you
during the game each have their own abilities, strengths and
weaknesses means that you will have to swap from one to another as
you play which gives added realism.  It's a pity that Crysella's
status screen shows her as a muscle-bound hunk but perhaps it was
better to do that than upset the feminist lobby by showing a
scantily-clad, buxom female!

                                         Sue