Previous Next

Picture the scene: you've just bought yourself a role-playing board-game, and you've taken it out of the box and arranged all the pieces on your bedroom floor. Then you've realised that all the pieces need painting, so you've nipped down the model shop for some paint, then spent the next three weeks covering your miniature metal Judge Dredd and Call of Cthulhu pieces with splodges of colour. By that time, your friends, hanging around in the den of iniquity known as "Alan's flat", the stench of dubious substances lingering in the air, have long since gone home and, quite possibly, died from boredom.

So why not buy the ST game version? After all, several programmers go out of their way to create an entire board game on the ST, and invariably they're much cheaper than their "analogue" counterparts. And, of course, you don't have to grapple with thirteen different brightly-coloured dice, nobody has to "be" the Dungeon Master, and you don't need to paint anything. Hurrah!

Space Crusade, then. This is the ST version of the best selling RPG board game, Space Crusade. Taken from a positive angle, you could bash on about the great 2D map version of the game, which switches to isometric 3D for the fight sequences. Then, of course, there's the option to play against your friends, and a couple of human opponents never did any harm.

Ah, but you could be highly negative and point out that, for the ST version of Space Crusade, Gremlin should really have included some skilful combat features to the game, thus removing some of the luck and chance elements from the battles. There are obviously RPG purists who require the exact replica of the board game on computer, but there are more who would like to see some more features which you couldn't actually do with a board game.

A bit like ST Pictionary, or Trivial Pursuit - it's got good intentions, but it doesn't quite work.

1. Neat graphics, and the 3D battle mode works quite well...
2. ...but switching to 3D permanently can be hard on the eyes.

1. Gameplay is limited by the roll of the dice.
2. The save game function is limiting.