Robin Hood: Defender of the Crown

There are only so many ways to introduce a Robin Hood product. In line with the traditions of journalistic irreverence and insouciance, it should generally include mildly mocking references to 'taking from the rich and giving to the poor', wearing an awful lot of green, and for those really looking to turn the knife in the semi-mythological man's side, possibly even snidely comments about Bryan Adams.

Unfortunately, Robin Hood: Defender of the Crown is sadly bereft of arrow-toting scenes featuring the great green wealth redistributor, so this writer is left filling an introduction with indirect abstractions.

You see, Defender of the Crown really owes more to classic board game Risk than any famous tales from the 'hood. Time is spent building up an army and ravaging nearby counties to increase your coffers turn-based style, with the ultimate objective of doing away with the other lords of the land who, naturally, are all trying to out-pillage you.

It's hardly the sort of proto-communist antics we expect from Robin Hood, but any fans of old skool gaming should recognise this as a port of the similarly named classic pillage-'em-up, released originally on the Commodore Amiga.

Aside from the turn-based strategy of the map screen where the large-scale destruction occurs, there are also a couple of mini-games that were also mainstays of the Amiga original. The first of these is where you take on one of your rival lords in a jousting competition, while in the second, you attempt to siege one of the castles on the game map, completing each of which successfully increases your fame and fortune.

These should really offer a nice diversion from the main Risk-style game, but unfortunately they are so broken that playing them is almost no fun at all.

In the jousting game, which only lasts a few seconds, you have to aim your lance at the bloke riding towards you. Alas, there's no suggestion as to exactly what part of him you should be pointing towards, and after many rounds you're likely to be none the wiser. Losing is therefore a certainty.

Raiding a castle is equally troublesome. This mini-game takes the form of a platformer, where you control a swashbuckling soldier aiming to dispatch a few henchmen across several screens of action.

The graphics here are rather good, believably recreating a castle-like environment, but the controls are so criminally clunky that you'll want to run away and raise the drawbridge yourself. Aside from the standard movement controls, you've only got the option of a lunge or block, and action is so jerky that any pretence at strategy quickly disappears in a puff of smoke.

It's some comfort, then, that the main part of the game is much less of a disaster – building up an army and taking over England's counties does have a certain thrill to it. However, this section is still plagued with crippling setbacks with regards to the interface department.

For starters, you can only have one mobile army – the rest have to be a defensive force based in garrisons around your various counties. And even then, you can't actually check what soldiers are in your garrisons unless your mobile army is in that particular area at the time.

If you're undertaking the experience with any sort of seriousness, this makes everything devolve into a sort of torturous memory game, where you have to keep track of all your forces without any sort of aid from the game whatsoever.

Whether or not this was a feature of the original game from 1986 is really a moot point. Things have moved on, and have done so for a reason. But it is an odd and unusual thing to be criticising the game interface for being dated rather than the graphics. While they aren't likely to set the world alight, the latter have actually fared the 21-year transition to mobile pretty well.

Still, they don't disguise the fact there are big cracks in this game. While not quite big enough to sail a barge through, they are large enough to enable any nostalgic goodwill associated with the game to ooze away. It's arguably worth a shot for those who spent many a devoted hour locked onto their Amiga screens thanks to Defender of the Crown, but for the rest of us, there's more fun to be had by going outside, donning some green tights, and playing hide and seek.