Champion of the Raj - Level 9/Mirrorsoft RRP œ25.99-30.99
     (Strategy game for PC (reviewed), ST and Amiga)

The time? The early 1800s. The place? India, a land of contrasts
in many ways with beautiful buildings such as the Taj Mahal while
many of its people live in great poverty. The occasion? The
arrival of a new Viceroy of the East India Company by ship from
England. Though the Mogul Emperors had ruled India for 200 years,
their empire had fallen. Different states, Indian and other, had
tried to take its place, each fighting with its neighbours, trying
to gain land, riches or both. Meanwhile, in the background were
the Thugs, worshipping the goddess Kali, carrying out sacrifices
in her name and watching the various states pulling the country
apart, biding their time until they could step in and take over.

The new Viceroy's route to Government House took him through the
bazaar with its fascinating, alien sights and sounds. Suddenly a
knife flashed - it was a Thug! Pressing the point of his knife to
the young Englishman's throat, he dragged him away to one of
Kali's temples where he was cast into a cell. In despair, the
Viceroy wondered what his fate was to be .... then, a flash of
green caught his eye as a young Indian girl walked past and threw
something into his cell. It was a small, sharp knife and hastily
he grabbed it and dug at the mortar around the bars of his cell
window until the bars were loose and he could escape to freedom.

He dashed from the temple, following the young girl who ran just
ahead of him and soon they arrived at the base of a cascading
waterfall where an old man waited. The old man and the young girl
embraced; she was his grand-daughter and at great risk to herself
she had carried out the rescue. Their plan is that someone should
unite India against the Thugs and when the Viceroy finally arrives
at Government House where a great reception is taking place in
honour of the six most powerful leaders in the country, it is clear
that one of these must, by whatever means he sees fit, subjugate
the other states under his rule so that India is strong enough to
defeat the Thugs once and for all.

This, then, is the background to Champion of the Raj, a real
departure for Level 9 from the text/graphics adventures we are
used to seeing from them. Your first decision is to choose a
character to play - the Viceroy, the Consul of the French East
India Company, the Emperor of the remaining Mogul Empire, the
Maharajah of the Maruthras, the Maharajah of the Sikhs or the
Chief of the Gurkhas. The Viceroy is the easiest scenario and the
rest go in order, with the Gurkha Chief being the hardest.

The main playing screen shows your character, a map of India with
the various states marked by their respective national or
independent flags. By the character's hand is a bell to "ring" to
signify the end of your turn and nearby a book which displays
information about the state you have currently selected. Its flag
will flutter in response. You can check on army status, wealth and
so forth, employing spies to gain further information. If you
select your own capital state, you can invest money in the army,
industry, law and order etc to increase the taxes you will amass
with the end of each turn.

There are two main ways to bring India under your rule; the
"softly, softly" approach or the "hit them before they hit you"
method. You can tread a path in between the two if you want,
relying on your skills as both a negotiator and general.
Selecting an opponent's state will bring up such options as "talk"
or "attack" at different times and it's up to you which you decide
to do!

"Softly, softly" involves holding Durbahs where you parade your
wealth in the form of as many elephants as you can sensibly afford
to impress the other rulers. You can then "talk" to them (if you
are given the option) and may be invited to take part in an
elephant race or tiger shoot. Do well at the chosen sport and the
state will come under your protection without a shot being fired
in anger (apart from at tigers); acquit yourself badly and you'll
be treated with as much respect as you deserve, ie none.  Both the
elephant race and tiger shoot involve arcade sequences.  Now I get
on as well with arcade games as Ted Heath does with Maggie
Thatcher - the race I could win occasionally but the shoot -
forget it; I was mauled more often than not. There was nothing for
it but to try the "hit 'em" method.

At first I did very badly. I was just about to give up and consign
the game to the section of the shelf where the sun never shines
when I suddenly got the hang of it. And though my initial
impressions of the game had been "nice graphics but where's the
game", I found myself getting hooked. I even found myself saying
"yes" when the computer asked if I wanted to command my own troops
in battle rather than letting it do it for me ...  absolutely
unheard of before in this household! I enjoyed the challenge of
deploying the men, elephants and sometimes cavalry and giving each
its orders, taking factors such as the terrain into account. To be
honest, it isn't that difficult though I did have some disasters
in the early stages with the men and elephants panicking and
fleeing.

There's no doubt about it, the graphics of the game are
beautifully drawn and all credit to Dicon Peeke for them. There is
music too, which no doubt sounds better using a music card such as
Roland or AdLib but sounds pretty dire through the internal
speaker so I disabled that from the start.

Picky bits? There are quite a few. You can play from floppies or a
hard drive on any of the machines. I would not recommend you touch
this game if you don't have a hard disk for your computer; the
disk swapping and sl-o-w play will drive you crazy. When I tried
to install it on the PC, it said there wasn't enough memory,
despite my removing several large programs in an attempt to make
room. I should have checked the disk space, it was lying! When I
ignored its error messages it installed without problems.

Hiring extra troops seems to have a serious bug in that if you
start to hire troops and then change your mind and try to remove
them you can lose both the men AND the money. That's infuriating.
Another infuriating thing is that if you are attacked and have few
men available so the odds are stacked against you, you are not
given the option to fight your own battle, it's assumed you'll let
the computer do it for you. Since I rapidly gained the opinion
that the computer was NOT on my side, I would have preferred to
have lost my own fight, thank you very much. I might at least have
taken some more of my opponent's men with me! Again, if the odds

are, say 73:10 in your favour, the generals manage without you. I
would have still preferred to play it myself.

All in all, Champion of the Raj surprised me by being a lot better
than I originally thought it would be. You can't escape all the
arcade sequences (such as storming an enemy's Palace, the odd
sword fight with a would-be assassin and the final confrontation
in the Thug Temple) but if you take the option to fight rather
than talk, you can get out of most of them.

Level 9 started out as the major British producers of good text
adventures in the early days, played about with interactive
characters in some of their later games with varying degrees of
success, did a side-step with Billy the Kid which I gather is
arcade-orientated and this last game is a strategy game. They've
tried it all and succeeded most of the time - what more can you
ask?
                                            Sue