Camelot II

Despite the fact that he's been long in the ground and that much of his supposed history is really a mishmash of various other mythic story threads, King Arthur remains one of the most enduring figures from Britain's past. The sheer amount of films that are based on, or borrow heavily from, the whole mythos of the Knights of the Round Table shows how romanticised the man's reign was.

It's a bit of a surprise then that Camelot II, despite pilfering all sorts of names from the Arthurian legends, doesn't really take any of the myth's stories that make the whole thing so attractive. Instead, the game all but plonks you in a dungeon and lets you get on with it.

Okay, so it's not quite that blasé, but the plot really is just skimming across the surface of the Arthurian treasure trove, rather than exploiting it properly. The deal is that you're King Arthur, who has tracked down his knights being held at the Castle of the Green Knight. To make the Green Knight appear, you have to collect ten swords from each of the four dungeon levels.

To navigate the dungeon, you are provided with two main visual windows. The first, which fills up most of your screen, is a first-person view of your surroundings (generally a big old endless corridor or a dead end). Your other navigating tool is a mini-map, which sits in the top left corner of the screen.

Camelot II features that old style of square by square jerk-o-vision movement that was the mainstay of the RPG genre on home computers before everything went fully 3D back in the mid-1990s. Thankfully though, Camelot II eases the movement between squares by having a transition animation that makes it seem a little more like your character is actually turning. (Long-term fans of the RPG genre may recall Stonekeep when playing the game, thanks to this feature.)

Whilst you're just moving around, the little mini-map is arguably more useful than the main view screen, since it's the easiest way to see where the twists and turns of the dungeon lie. This is because the main view screen uses the same graphic for a straight corridor as one that features an immediate turn to your left! A little lazy, but the prolific use of pillars lets us forgive Camelot II, if only purely on visual terms.

The main screen is essential though when you encounter enemies. That said, they are not massively varied, featuring the stock cast of Orks (perhaps this shows me up as an otherworld philistine, but who spells Orcs with a 'k'?!), bats and the like. When you bump into these nasties, you have to move a target around the screen aiming for them, turning the game into something of a shooting gallery. Some enemies have armour, too, so it's not always as simple as just aiming at any part of a moving blob.

All this might sound passably entertaining, but in practice much of the gameplay simply feels limp. The combat dynamics are repetitive and, in the end, mostly uninteresting. Very shortly after you begin to play, you realise that the castle you're stalking through is a maze rather than a properly designed level – a large block within which almost every land square is either filled with a wall or a corridor. There are keys to find and doors to unlock, but there's not enough to stop the veil of the mundane slipping over the gameplay.

The game's biggest sin is revealed though when you've collected all the swords in a level and have to face the Green Knight. Put aside any thoughts of an epic joust – rather, you are taken to a basic memory puzzle game. However, you're not told how to play the game and the help menu only tells you (in an incredibly vague way) that when you meet the green knight, you'll be faced with a memory game challenge. This means that you're likely to fail the starter level the first time around, especially given that the memory game is also on a timer.

And guess what happens when you fail the level? Yup, you have to start all over again. This wouldn't be too bad were the gameplay more compelling, but after rummaging around the maze for a quarter of an hour, looking for swords and keys, the last thing you want to do is go straight back in there for another poke around.

Even if it wasn't for this despair-inducing feature, Camelot II would be less than dazzling. Upon first glance, the game looks fairly interesting, seeming to hark back to all those old RPG classics from the aforementioned Stonekeep to the much loved Eye of the Beholder and Lands of Lore series. Once you get playing, though, you'll realise this is really a basic maze with a fancy graphical interface and not much more.

Camelot II isn't really forgiving or quick enough to work on a simple puzzle basis, either, so unfortunately it's thumbs down from all sides of this round table jury.