Firebird
    A Tads Game ( part of SynTax Library disk 1227 PC )
                Tested on a 286 and P200MMX

                  Reviewed by Nick Edmunds

You play Prince Ivan, the Tsar's Son, who seeking his father's
favour has gone into the forest (armed with a bow and a quiver
containing one arrow) to hunt and brood.  Based on Russian
folklore this game has a decent storyline, relatively simple
puzzles and a fairytale ending.

As Firebird is quite a straight forward game I have held my tongue
as to much of the gameplay in order not to spoil any of the
spontaneity.

Firebird contains many nice descriptions which set the scene more
than adequately without going overboard and has a good dose of
humour which, from what we learn in the game, is fortunately not
Russian.  Although, even my limited knowledge of Russian folklore
told me that a few of the humour elements contained therein
weren't quite authentic, eg. the chefs, which made me smile and so
probably achieved their purpose (unless I'm missing something of
course).

Command recognition is fairly versatile so there's little chance
of straining your vocabulary on this one and the flowing plot
maintains a reasonable pace while occasionally taking you by the
hand and leading you by the means of a text cut scene or a small
hint/prompt which could save you having to go back for something.

My only niggly little criticisms are:
- There are a few simple logic problems in the programming, eg.
taking the arrow while it's in the quiver puts it in the quiver,
but they are very few and do not really affect gameplay in any
way.
- The repetition of some actions is a bit tiresome, although I
would imagine that this was done in order to stay true to the
original folk tale and as such should be forgiven by most. Anyway

it doesn't happen that often and it's what we have arrow keys for
after all.

All in all I found Firebird to be a good all-round fun Text
Adventure with no real shortcomings.














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