Previous Next

For centuries, people have bashed each other in the head with heavy things. Now there's a historical game about it. James Leach nurses his throbbing loaf and investigates...

Have you seen the film Highlander? It's about a bloke who doesn't die, but keeps fighting another bloke down through the centuries. It's completely excellent - get to see it on vid if you haven't already.

Millennium Warriors has got a pretty similar plot. You play a special character who can zip around in time. The game contains loads of details about who he is, why he's there and what he's fighting for, but they don't appear to have been thought out particularly well. Either that or they've deliberately been written to provide a bit of amusement while you wait for the game to load. It's filled with 'the axe of Strin' and 'the mountains of Grog'-type fantasy, but you can forget most of this, as you don't need to know the painful details.

The game is divided into five eras. These are arranged in chronological order, so the earliest period occurs first. It's the caveman era, and you are transported in a weird little spacecraft to a cave somewhere on an ancient, dinosaur-infested continent that used to float around this great planet of ours.

So you're in a cave. There's another bloke in the cave with you. You're both armed with these 'axe of strin' things, and you start advancing towards each other. Only a major miracle can prevent violence. Guess what? A miracle doesn't happen and you start clubbing seven bells out of the other guy. He, of course, does the same to you.

There are several types of violence you can do; head shots, chest swipes and low leg-breakers are just a few. Of course, the enemy fellow can do all these to you, so luckily you've got some blocking shots as well. Doing the same moves without the fire button held down has the effect of parrying the blows, but you have to guess accurately where the next swipe is heading.

You've got three power bars which go up and down as the fight progresses: there's the energy bar which goes down the more you move around; there's the health bar, which goes down every time you're hit; and there's the weapons bar which decreases with every strike you make. If it gets to zero, you've got to fight on weaponless. Which is tricky and indeed dangerous.

If you get through the caveman level, you're transported a few thousand years forwards to Mediaeval times. Here you've got a sword and armour, and you're in a similar battle with a familiar-looking chap on a drawbridge. The same moves of the joystick produce the same blows, but there are other things to consider, like the range of the sword and the strength of the shield.

Win that one and you get thrown into an Arabian flying carpet battle. Hovering over a rather pretty Middle Eastern town, you blast firebolts at the other guy. You can move in eight directions, rather than the two you've been using up until now, and you can even wrap around the screen. It's more tactical, it's tougher and it involves a lot of quick joystick tricks to get into an attacking position.

Right. You've knocked the other dude off his carpet. Now you fly through space once more towards the time of the Spanish Main. You're on board a galleon which is billowing along the high seas (well, not moving at all, really). You can climb the rigging, run along the rails and generally hide rather a lot as you fight another chap; this time your weapons are long, pointy swords. It's far quicker and less cumbersome than the heavily-armoured knights, and it's a different kind of combat altogether (altogether: "It's a different kind of combat!").

Get past this and you're laughing because there's only one more challenge to face: the mighty space battle. Surprisingly, this involves two blokes slugging it out with laser beams in an eight-way scrolling space setting,

The fighting sequences are all well achieved, with excellent animation and clear graphics. All the moves you've got are neat and precise, and basically it's a good fighting game. The only problem is that there isn't enough variety. You're supposed to learn tactics from the battles throughout time, so that you're fully prepared to beat the spaceman at the end, but it's more like just chopping your way past five semi-tough guys.

All the same, it's jolly amusing in two-player mode and with all the collectables you can find, there's a wee bit of strategy involved too. But only five battles is a bit stingy, and all the pretty text boxes and spacecrafty bits don't make up for it. It could have been better.

1. Each battle is pretty much the same as the last one.
2. There's no real variation in the gameplay at all.
3. And there are only battles and five baddies in total.

1. Excellent backgrounds add a cartoony feel to the game.
2. The sprites are well-drawn.
3. The animation is superb.
4. Loads of collectables.
5. Two-player option is an immense amount of fun, especially when you're winning.
6. Sound effects are sharp and not at all irritating (unless you've been playing for hours).