ZX Computing


Devil's Crown
By Mastertronic
Spectrum 48K

 
Published in ZX Computing #24

Devil's Crown

There's a game by the same name floating around for the Amstrad, released by Amsoft and costing £7.99. I hope it's not an Amstrad version of the same game, because while it's a passable budget title, it certainly isn't worth more than about £2.

Devil's Crown is an underwater collect-the-objects game, set on board a sunken pirate vessel. You play an archaeologist who, in his little mini-sub, has discovered the ship and now seeks to recover the seven jewels that were on board when it sunk. But before you can locate the jewels you have to find an assortment of other objects and reunite them with their 'flashing' counterparts (so, if you discover a flashing key in one cabin, that means there's another key elsewhere that you have to collect and bring together with the flashing one). There are forty screens in all, all drawn in some fairly garish colours, and occupied by killer fish (who drain your oxygen supply) and the ghosts of long dead pirates. Your sub is armed with a limited supply of bullets and there are oxygen cylinders to be found in order to boost your dwindling supply.

The game itself isn't especially challenging since, apart from avoiding or killing the fish and ghosts, there isn't very much required of you other than to keep on going from cabin to cabin looking for objects. This on its own simply didn't prove challenging or addictive enough to make me determined to see it through to the end, especially since the sub can ony carry one object at a time and constantly going back and forth through the same screens time after time eventually became too repetitive to hold my attention.

Perhaps though, I'm expecting too much from a game that costs just £1.99. The loud colours and simple cartoony style of graphics remind me of a children's colouring book, so perhaps this pocket money game is aimed at a very young and relatively unsophisticated audience who might not yet be able to cope with complex arcade and adventure games.