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Its Medieval England and your mission to to become holder of the Evil Crown, distinguishing you as the most ruthless, powerful baronial maniac in the whole kingdom. Manage your land, your army and your people, keep your enemies at bay, partake in some trading to keep your coffers full and drop in on the occasional joisting competition. Rollicking good fun and easy to play thanks to an excellent icon-driven system.

HERE'S an oddity - a throwback to Dictator and all those games where you decide how much food to give the peasants and how much land to cultivate and how much longer to play.

Evil Crown is set in mediaeval England, and you have to extend your fame and prosperity as one of those wicked barons of old. Everything's driven by icons.


The main part involves assigning areas of land to be cultivated, setting taxes, deciding what to pay the king to avoid providing soldiers for his risky wars and setting aside a sum for the annual tournament.

Once that's over, you get the hunt, where a beast moves across the screen. You don't get to kill it, you watch instead. Lucky beast.

Then there's the tournament, a real lulu. The two knights thunder down with the sort of stunted sound effects you might expect. Meanwhile you're trying to keep your lance tip on a red shield which leaps about a picture of a knight. Unfortunately you're just as likely to lose anyway - and that goes for the rest of the game. Although our pre-production copy had a bug on the joystick menu, which Argus swears will be fixed, the rest of the game is said to be complete.

If that's the case, then it's also virtually unplayable. Peasants revolt and land disappears for no obvious reason. No matter how much you spend on your, militia, you always seem to lose the battles.

We rang Argus to see what we were doing wrong. After getting some tips, we set taxes and the rest at the recommended rates and out we went again.

Evil Crown really ought to be a good, witty game with lots of detail. Instead it's dull, constructed and ultimately worthless.


Publisher Argus/Mind Games Price £9.99
Memory 48K Joystick Cursor, Sinclair, Kempston
*

Chris Bourne

THE EVIL CROWN
Mind Games / £9.95

Dougie: The Evil Crown is an Icon driven trading simulation of the middle ages, where you take the part of lord and master over the peasants. But that's not enough to satisfy your lust for power, so you're going for the big one, The Evil Crown, Top Dog, The BOSS!
As Top Baddy, your job's to make sure the peasants don't get too big for their boots, sort out the other Barons who've got designs on the throne, look after your loyal troops and expand your lands as well! Not only that, you've got to thrash the chainmail off your opponents' knights at the annual jousting tournament. Nothing too difficult, in fact, it's all in a knight's work for an apprentice tyrant like yourself. Be careful at the jousting though, as some of the knights are a bit knatty with ye olde lance, they like to lance-a-lot (groan Ed.).
The game itself is well written and the graphics are fairly good, not brilliant, but they'll do. The icon driver is one of the smoothest and easiest I've ever used.
Although I enjoyed playing The Evil Crown, I have to say that they'd have a hard job separating me from a tenner for it! Perhaps Mind Games should concentrate more on the software and less on the megasized boxes! 5/10
Ross: Mind Games have made the move from menu to icon and pointer driven games quite smoothly, and seem to find games that suit this new environment. The graphics are great and the game's pretty enjoyable. 9/10
Rick: It's the only game of Kingdoms that I reckon's worth playing. The icons are a bit tricky at first, but you'll soon get used to them. 8/10