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The Black Knight is not the most amiable character you could wish to meet. For years, he's been terrorising the locals and, since he's pretty powerful, the population are afraid to take up arms against him. All except for one young man who, with nothing but a supply of rocks and his skill and courage, dares to face the sombre terrors of the sinister fortress.

The Black Knight's castle comprises 14 chambers split into four areas marked by doors: Trouble, Fireball, Chamber, and Shield. Entering either the first or second door puts you randomly in the Trouble or Fireball areas, the third places you in the Knight's Chamber, and the fourth in the Shield area.

Sixty rocks are provided at the beginning of the game: these are vital in combatting the variety of guards, bats, rats and other fiendish, benighted and befanged inhabitants of the castle. As usual, contact with any of the baddies brings instant death, and a loss of one of the player's four lives.

Somewhere within the rooms lurk the only two items that can destroy the Black Knight: fireballs win fabulous prizes - no such luck on the computer, however. This time up to seven triangular lights must be extinguished by picking a category from a choice of two. The amount of seconds earned in the main part of the game are displayed, as are the three possible answers to the question asked. At first, four of the seven lights must be extinguished; with subsequent questions five, six and finally seven lights have to be put out.

Oh dear, I never thought I would see the day that Mirrorsoft released a turkey of a game, but sadly that's exactly what Dark Castle is. Graphically it's dire, with crude, cardboard cut out sprites hobbling around bland backdrops; sound is little better with a dubious choice between retarded spot effects and an inoffensive tune that prattles away to itself, but thankfully doesn't become annoying.

What is annoying, almost to the state of throwing the computer out of the nearest window, is the infuriating multi-load system. Almost every screen is separately loaded - it this was a decent game I wouldn't mind quite so much, but for this, it's not really on.

I can't really believe that this product comes from a company who've had such brilliant releases in the past.

It's excusable to put something like Defender Of The Crown on two sides of a disk, but I would question the sense of doing the same with a four level platform game, no matter how good it is.

So much space is used up on the same icon selection system sported by the 16-bit versions, but the C64 version wouldn't suffer at all by its absence. Another drain on memory is the constant use of digitised sound, which is justified on machines such as the Atari ST which have a poor sound chip and bytes to burn, but I'm sure skilled use of the SID chip could better some of these crackling samples any day.

With better planning and restructuring for the smaller machine, Dark Castle could have been good - the graphics are certainly well up to scratch, and the high level of control the player has over his character is remarkable - but the constant disk flipping soon became irritating, and I dread to think what the cassette version will be like.

Presentation 25%
Sparse instructions coupled with a very annoying multi-load system. The icon selection system is a waste of memory.

Graphics 52%
Very small, detailed and generally well animated, but sometimes basic to a fault; lacking in colour.

Sound 48%
Wide use of samples, none of which are brilliant: the overall effect is reasonable, however.

Hookability 39%
Any initial interest is squashed by the long-winded multi-load.

Lastability 26%
The endless disk access is disproportionate to the number of screens offered (only four!)

Overall 41%
An unusually poor release from Mirrorsoft.