Personal Computer News


Demon Lord
By Mansfield Computers & Electronics
Spectrum 48K

 
Published in Personal Computer News #058

DEMON LORD

This cassette contains the first half of four-part Demon Lord: Fortress of Fear and Forbidden Forest. There's a simple picture for each location.

Set in England at the time of King Arthur, your task is to infiltrate Perilous Castle, lair of the vile Demon Lord, where Arthur himself is "held in chains of finest steel, tempered in hell".

The graphics occupy the top half of the screen, with a description underneath, including exits and visible objects (still worth having a look for others!) and room for your responses at the bottom. The drawings are adequate, and you have to wait for the picture to be drawn even if you're just passing through a location. As the author has chosen to include his objects in the picture, it has to be drawn each time you take an object. What's more, some locations have several objects yet you are allowed only single entry commands.

Demon Lord

Your tasks require careful planning though, and you often have to decide whether discretion or violence is preferable. Do you stay and fight the head hunters, run away, hide, or what? The customary healthy dose of magic is involved.

A help feature in each location suggests what line of thought you ought to be following; you also need to uncover secret words at different stages, as these are needed to go through doorways and past an Elf in Section Two who gives you a grilling worthy of Magnus Magnusson.

Demon Lord has good points, and taxes the brain at times but the clumsy text isn't especially evocative. Your commands are read as strings, so unless you have it spot on within the two or three possibilities you get the standard response: "Sorry not acceptable."

Geof Wheelwright

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