Players Premier
£2.99
Fancy playing a part in a strange story of elves, witches and magic cauldrons? Well, Elven Warrior is the one for you. Elf has learnt how to perform magic after discovering an immortal manuscript full of spells. You have to help him out by exploring the kingdom and collecting four potions to fill the magic cauldron.
Playing the game is very simple, with you not being able to jump diagonally, only up, which is extremely annoying when you need to cross a gap - it's just impossible. Catering for all tastes there's the option of having the game in either green monochrome (yeuchh!) or full colour: you do get a little clash but nothing too drastic.
Collecting potions and filling cauldrons seems the most boring concept in the world for a game, but Elven Warrior is surprisingly addictive. Each time you fill a cauldron and go exploring again, you find that lifts have appeared, new scenery has been created and the game is getting bigger and bigger.
The sprites are small but detailed, and the animation is very smooth. You could say it's a glorified platforms and ladders variant, and why not? Everybody loves a nice little game to get stuck into. Elven Warrior will keep you occupied for ages, working out where all the potions are and starting again because you jumped on the wrong cliff and into a fire! Great fun.
Label: Players Premier
Author: Duncan Kershaw
Price: £2.99
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Chris Jenkins
My dears, believe me, it's a terrible life being an elf. Not only do you have to fight off the mighty forces of evil armed with only the most twee weapons, but you never seem to be able to find a hairdresser when you need one.
Take this Elven Warrior affair. It was the usual tedious business; I had to find four potion bottles and return them to the cauldrons from whence they came ('From whence' - that's the way elves are supposed to talk. In fact we talk just like anyone else, my dears.) Anyway, these pansy potions According to Him Upstairs, the idea was to find them all and gain the Book of Immortality (and you can buy that at any branch of W.H. Dwarfs, as any fool knows.) But along the way there were the usual oh-so-dreary hazards to contend with; zombies, flying eyes, black knights, lizard men. deadly spikes and pits of water. My dears, my hair was simply RUINED! I suppose there was some excitement when secret doors opened and the landscapes changed each time I returned to a cauldron, but one has simply seen it all, too too often...
There were some consolations. The scenery was nice. You know, rolling hills, quaint cottages, vines to climb from level to level (when I could find them), broken-down crucifixes, dank caverns, sinister dungeons... well, those bits weren't so charming. The background music was perfectly sweet, though. But the intellectual level of these zombies! I'm sure not one of them would know Jean-Paul Gaultier from his sit-upon. I genuinely believe I was doing them a favour putting them out of their misery - shooting them with my meager supply of arrows, then swapping to more stylish weapons such as staffs and stealth axes which dispose of a handful of them without making an unsightly mess on the carpet.
Well, I might not have been able to find a hairdresser, but there were plenty of arrows, food packages and treasures along the way, and apart from tearing my tights leaping from plateau to plateau and dodging those flying eyes, mad skulls and energy balls, things could have been a lot worse.
But there must be more to life than this endless repetitious adventuring, so my friend Percy Pixie and I are planning to run away to Eastbourne and open a little tea-room. It should be a lot safer than this Elven Warrior malarkey, and about as exciting.
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