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An Englishman's home is his castle, but when was the last time yours was attacked by a gang of rampaging Celts? This game taxes your brain while you tax the peasants...

You're running out of room in your old two-up, two-down and decide to get an extension. So you get planning permission, re-mortgage your house, get some builders in - who do nothing but drink tea and leer at your womenfolk - and then you have to throw an extension-warming party. Yawn, yawn, yawn.

It was all so much simpler in the 13th Century. All you had to do then was to design your castle, hire loads of bods to do the hard graft and then defend it from Celtic suicide missions and treacherous noblemen. On your days off you could even get involved in a spot of invading.

Now you can delve back into Albion's dim and distant past and recreate the glamour, romance and bloody hand-to-hand combat of castle-building. And nary a sub-contractor's mate in sight. There are four levels of difficulty - peasant, duke, prince and king - and you can choose from a single-castle, three-castle or eight-castle campaign. They key to the game is how well you manage your castle's design and finances. Build the castle in the wrong place or in the wrong way and it soon collapses. Similarly, if you over-tax the peasants you become unpopular and they rebel against you. You also have to ensure that the cupborads in your castle are kept full of food - in case of a siege - and that your army is well-trained.

Castles is controlled by using either the mouse or the joystick - you have to browse through a selection of menu options. You click on up and down arrows to increase or decrease the number of labourers, for example, but, because the arrows are so small, it's all too easy to click on the wrong one. The sprites aren't particularly well-drawn - in the battle scenes it can be difficult to select a target for the archers to aim at. The flip option - where you view the castle from one of two possible angles - is limited and often the bit of the castle you need to see disappears off the screen. What the game needs is either a zoom mode, or more flip options.

The manual is good and pretty humorous, although the banter between Sir Richard and Alain in the Guide To Castle-Building can detract from what they're actually trying to communicate.

Once you've sussed out the tricky control system and mastered the perils of castle-building and design, you're likely to get rather bored - there's a lot of disk-accessing and, especially during the final stages of building, you can just find yourself staring blankly into space while your ST does its own thing.

The battle scenes are too piddly for you to get to grips with and you can even defeat the enemy without doing a thing. It's a shame you don't get the opportunity to besiege other castles either - you are always the victim, never the aggressor. Castles promised much, but in the end delivered little.