Chronicles of the Sword

                 Reviewed by Julian Gregory

To give me a rest from all the RPGs I have been playing recently I
decided to take a look at Chronicles of the Sword.  The game is
based around the Court of King Arthur and you play the part of Sir
Gawain, a newly knighted squire championed by Sir Lancelot.  It
appears that Morgana, King Arthur's sister has ideas to overthrow
the court and rule in her brother's place. Your job, surprise,
surprise, is to somehow prevent her from doing this.

The game seems mainly to consist, initially, of performing
tasks for Merlin, after you have found out how to get to see him.
In order to do this you will need to search the sumptuous
locations and speak to several other characters you may come
across. The best character for information is the stable lad Wilf,
who complained about how busy he was. But every time I saw him he
was sitting on a barrel scratching himself!

The cursor is normally a red outlined arrow. If it passes over an
object which has some importance it changes to a solid red arrow.
To me this has always an objection to graphical adventures. It is
very easy to waft the cursor over the screen just to see if there
is anything required here.

There is some real-time fighting in the game, but this should not
be a problem. I found that the easiest way around this part was to
switch the game to Easy Mode and the fights were done for you.

Most of the game uses just the left mouse button. The right is
used to access the inventory screen and to be able to Save or
Restore.

The game comes on two CDs and there is an annoying problem.  There
is quite a lot of walking about between locations and where
nothing seems to happen. After you have left Camelot and journeyed
to see Demdike (Merlin's tutor) and then on to Lyoness Castle, if
you should return to Camelot, there is a lot of disk swapping
required, which I found rather tedious.

Having said that, the pictures are wonderfully detailed and show
that much care went into their production. In dark locations your
character is that much harder to see then in lighter places. This
may not seem much, but does show the care which has gone into some
of the game.

The game itself, in my opinion, does not quite live up to the
pictures.  I could not decide if it was meant to be taken
light-heartedly or if you were meant to be serious. An example of
this is that there are two fairy rings. The fairies turn out to be
fairly large, muscular and green!  Certainly not my idea of
fairies!

The game should run on all present day machines, as the minimum
spec is a 486 DX2 66, a double speed CD ROM Drive and 4M of
Memory.

Overall 60%
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