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Hell's bells, where's Mark when you need him? A freak shift in the Earth's magnetic field caused this game to be accidentally given to me for review, the world's all-time least knowledgeable Dungeons & Dragons expert.

Pages and pages of manual blurb about 'Champions Of Krynn', 'A Dragonlance Epic, Vol. II', 'Knights of Solamnia' and all sorts of other guff flew straight over my head as I attempted to bludgeon my way into this forbidding-looking game.

(There's a serious point in here - it doesn't seem to have occurred to SSI that someone might buy this game without any prior knowledge of the series, and there isn't much here to help them work out what on earth's supposed to be going on! For those who do know what the game's all about though, documentation is pretty comprehensive and impressive.)

Running up against a particularly unhelpful copy-protection system didn't improve matters any either, so it was with great trepidation that I eventually (one re-load later) found myself starting the game. And boy, was I in for a surprise...

After the endless pages of info and instructions on character attributes, weapons, movements and spells, what I quite definitely wasn't expecting to discover in the end was a game remarkably similar in concept to a geriatric 8-bit classic by the name of Chaos (by Laser Squad author Julian Gollop).

Now that's simplifying matters somewhat, but all through playing Death Knights Of Krynn I just couldn't shake the feeling of deja vu. You can tell this is a serious D&D game though, because it's not as user-friendly, making you hack through several menus before you actually get to make a move.

Not only that, but when you hit an enemy (or get hit by them) the message telling you the result of the attack flashes up for the briefest possible instant, making it impossible to know what's happened unless you put the game on its slowest setting.

Difficulty is a bit on the high side as well - my party were slaughtered many times by the first band of baddies they met without there seeming to be much I could do about it at all.

You could argue that there's not much point in my reviewing at all, and I'd tend to agree. Dungeons & Dragons aficionados will disregard any of my criticism as coming from a non-expert - which is fair enough, sort of - and non-fans aren't very likely to have this game high on their list of possible purchases anyway - unless this was a 90 percent game (and it's clearly not, even for D&D fans) they'd probably just look at the mark, see nothing to change their minds, and not bother reading any further.

So really, I could pretty much say anything I like at this point and no-one would notice. I believe there are many inherent deficiencies in an over-centralised media sysstem, baby. See?

Ahem. The fact of the matter is - and it pains me to say it, it really does! - this is okay if you like That Kind Of Thing. The release of Eye Of The Beholder makes it redundant in every meaningful way, but that won't put off the die-hard fans, and neither could anything else I might say.

Unnecessarily fiddly control in a surprisingly simplistic game makes for a very average AD&D release. There isn't much here for the non-converted.