BLUDGEON on SynTax PD 720
            (Shareware fantasy battle sim for ST)

       Unregistered version reviewed by James Jillians

Bludgeon is a fantasy battle simulation, pure and simple. The idea
is to give instructions to your army of men to move around the
board, kill off the hordes of enemies and finally achieve a
predetermined objective.

The game is played on a board which is a grid of squares with
floor spaces, obstacles and other inanimate objects. You can be
scroll around with GEM-like arrows to uncover a pretty large
battle ground, most of which is blank until your army comes within
viewing range.

Standing around is your team of trusty soldiers ready to march
into battle for death or glory. They are a motley crew, comprising
of green, blue and red men, each with advantages over the others.
They are armed with a variety of weapons, and some are wizards
with spells to cast. You can get a load of information about each
character which appears on the right hand side of the screen, and
in the registered version there are lots of nice icons to click
on.

The first thing to do is give your army some orders. This can be
done by clicking on individuals and choosing what you want them to
do from an option menu - actions like attack, go to, cast spell,
hold position and advance are all available. The men can be moved
en masse as well by defining action groups. After a short walk,
your men will come across the first enemies. There is no option to
negotiate, so the only way is to hack, chop and blast your way to
victory.

Fighting consists only of moving next to an enemy and selecting
"attack" from the menu, then waiting until you kill or are killed
yourself. Wizards can have a bit more fun - they have quite a few
spells to fling at their foes at regular intervals, although most
of these seem to do much the same thing.

And that's basically it. This sort of game will only appeal to a
certain sort of person - one who enjoys battle simulations. The
rest of us will be bored by Bludgeon. The game goes extremely
slowly, and is enormously repetitive. The fighting takes ages and
involves no skill beyond moving your soldiers towards the enemy,
and there are dozens of enemies to kill in each game. The strategy
lies in manoeuvring your army to make fighting easier, but the
slow pace makes the average fun-seeker switch off after only a few
enemies are dead.

The game has options to load new scenarios or create your own,
although these are deactivated in the unregistered version (as
well as quite a lot of other things). Registration initially costs
œ10, but the game is improved every so often, and to receive
regular improvements, new scenarios and newsletters will cost you
œ15 for six. There is also the option to connect computers up and
play multi-player games in the full version.

The graphics are reasonably clear, but nothing special, and there
is no sound.

War game and battle simulation fanatics will enjoy this game
(probably), but the average adventurer who is just looking for
some entertainment will be bored stiff. It is certainly not worth
getting only the unregistered version because too many of the
options are unavailable. For those of us not truly interested in
this genre œ10 is probably too much to pay for registration.

                     FUN FACTOR : 5/10










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