[{"TitleName":"Dark Empire","Publisher":"MC Lothlorien Ltd","Author":"David Bolton","YearOfRelease":"1987","ZxDbId":"0001256","Reviews":[{"Issue":{"Name":"Crash Issue 43, Aug 1987","Price":"£1","ReleaseDate":"1987-07-30","Editor":"Roger Kean","TotalPages":116,"HasCoverTape":false,"FlannelPanel":"Editor: Roger Kean\r\nAssistant Editor: Barnaby Page\r\nStaff Writers: Lloyd Mangram, Richard Eddy, Ian Phillipson, Ben Stone\r\nPhotographers: Cameron Pound, Michael Parkinson\r\nOffice: Sally Newman\r\nTechnical Editor: Simon N Goodwin\r\nAdventure: Derek Brewster\r\nPBM: Brendon Kavanagh\r\nStrategy: Philippa Irving\r\nLondon: John Minson\r\nContributors: Gareth Adams, Jon Bates, Robin Candy, Mel Croucher, Mike Dunn, Franco Frey, Dominic Handy, Nick Roberts, Mark Rothwell, Paul Sumner\r\n\r\nPRODUCTION\r\n\r\nProduction Controller: David Western\r\nArt Director: Gordon Druce\r\nIllustrator: Oliver Frey\r\nLayout: Tony Lorton, Mark Kendrick, Tim Croton, Seb Clare\r\nProcess and Planning: Matthew Uffindell, Jonathan Rignall, Nick Orchard\r\nAdvertisement Manager: Roger Bennett\r\nAdvertisement Assistant: Nick Wild\r\nSubscriptions: Denise Roberts\r\nMail Order: Carol Kinsey\r\n\r\nEditorial and Production: [redacted]\r\n\r\nMail Order and Subscriptions: [redacted]\r\n\r\nADVERTISING\r\n[redacted]\r\n\r\nTypesetting by The Tortoise Shell Press, Ludlow\r\n\r\nColour origination by Scan Studios [redacted]\r\n\r\nPrinted in England by Carlisle Web Offset, [redacted] - member of the BPCC Group.\r\n\r\nDistributed by COMAG, [redacted]\r\n\r\nNo material may be reproduced whole or in part without written consent of the copyright holders. We cannot undertake to return any written material sent to CRASH unless accompanied by a suitably stamped addressed envelope. Unsolicited written or photo material which may be used in the magazine is paid for at our current rates.\r\n\r\n©1987 Newsfield Limited\r\n\r\nCover by Oliver Frey"},"MainText":"DARK EMPIRE\r\n\r\nProducer: Lothlorien\r\nRetail Price: £9.95\r\n\r\nMany letters in FRONTLINE FORUM express an interest in fantasy wargames. These can bridge the reality gap, the feeling of dissociation from the subject matter which can alienate strategy games from the historical setting of a real war.\r\n\r\nAnd while a real war can never fit into the artificial constraints of a game, no matter how clever the system is, a fantasy war can be tailor-made for computer-gaming. So it can be a slicker piece of software.\r\n\r\nDark Empire certainly is. Its scenario doesn't make many concessions to realism, even fantasy realism. It's set long, long ago, on a planet far, far away... where there is a world which resembles a conglomeration of modern paranoid fears about totalitarian regimes.\r\n\r\nThe people of this planet think they're leading normal lives. The outside universe certainly thinks all is well there. But the population is controlled and manipulated by an 'evil alien force', the Dario Empire - and so successfully that the oppressed multitude couldn't communicate with the outside to ask for help, even if they were aware they needed it.\r\n\r\nDespite this, for reasons not explored by Lothlorien, the Deep Space Authorities got to hear about it and dispatched a Liberation Task Force, presumably to impose their own benign rule on the planet.\r\n\r\nThe action takes place across the planet's continents and oceans. As usual in long-range wargaming, single units represent armies or fleets; and battles, instead of being played out in tactical detail, are fought on contact with enemy units.\r\n\r\nThere are two maps. One gives a large-scale overview of land masses, cities and deployment of units. The other zooms in closer. The landscape is totally blank, so terrain doesn't enter into Dark Empire, the style and speed of the gameplay would make such a refinement cumbersome anyway.\r\n\r\nThe presentation is immaculate. The front end of the game allows the player to load a previously saved game or create a new one. If you choose the latter option, the program leaves you waiting for minutes while it randomly generates a new set of continents. To reassure the impatient that there's still someone there, the game counts to itself. Sometimes the process is quite quick, and it only gets up to 300. Sometimes it goes above 1,000. I have no idea why. But this is certainly one way of creating suspense.\r\n\r\nPressing a key brings up a detailed map with beautifully designed counters. The first thing to do is enter the break-in menu, which has an impressive range of options. As usual you can redefine the control keys, and you can also change the onscreen colours and after some elements of gameplay.\r\n\r\nBut beware: some apparently optional extras in this menu (like the display of your strength in units) seem rather essential, and you might find yourself playing a shorn version of the game without realising it.\r\n\r\nAnd it's odd that you have to be into the game itself before you can start altering these parameters; still, you can juggle things about easily at any point.\r\n\r\nThe break-in menu also acts as a kind of unofficial pause mode, for Dark Empire is played in real time. (The absurdity of imagining that armies and fleets can be moved around an entire world in real time is symptomatic of the game's artificiality.)\r\n\r\nThe object is simply to capture cities. Each continent is peppered with cities, some of them ports, and all are named; but this provides temporary atmosphere only. Because of the random regeneration of the world at the start of each game there's no point in mapping.\r\n\r\nDiscovering the map is part of the gameplay, in fact; you start out in possession of a single city, one army and a transport fleet, and can see only a tiny fragment of the surrounding land and sea. Moving units out into the unknown lights up the darkness, revealing new land masses, cities, and eventually enemy units.\r\n\r\nWhen a city is under the player's control, it can join his war effort. Inland cities manufacture new army units, and ports can turn out naval units. There are no resource points to worry about, but it takes cities a while to round up an army or turn out a fleet - and time is the currency in this game. At the side of the map a counter ticks away the seconds, so nimbleness in manipulating the cumbersome movement system is important.\r\n\r\nThe units are controlled by icons. You can set an army trundling off in a specific direction, or tell it to make for a particular point. But the routine isn't intelligent enough to allow for corners and other obstructions, so guiding the units around the contours of the continents can become a wearisome catch-it-if-you-can. And of course you can deal with only one unit at a time, so when the game really gets under way there can be over 50 units doing nothing in the meantime.\r\n\r\nThough most of the important business takes place on land, there's only one type of land unit. In contrast there are five different naval units, including submarines, destroyers, and transports for ferrying army units. The transports have a well-defined function, and can carry up to three army units. But though there are probably interesting parameters at work under the surface, it's difficult to see how attacking with one kind of ship or another makes much difference.\r\n\r\nAnd because there are virtually no statistics attached to the units - just a lame indicator of strength - there's no scope for intelligent decision-making. To capture cities, you have to throw one army unit after another upon them, in single file, till they fall.\r\n\r\nIt seems complicating factors like statistics have been excluded to keep the gameplay fast and simple, but we're left with a piece of software which looks more like a conventional cardboard-counters boardgame than anything I've seen recently - and yet plays nothing like it.\r\n\r\nAfter taking over a few continents unopposed, you meet the enemy. The the game begins to degenerate into unplayability - there's simply too much going on at once to the two-handed, single-brained player to cope with.\r\n\r\nYou can easily capture 25 cities or so before you meet the enemy, and if you set those cities on continuous production (from the break-in menu) they'll happily churn out more units than you could ever get to the front line.\r\n\r\nBut because the ships are so difficult to manoeuvre, the player is likely to find himself engaged in a war of attrition - the attrition of his nerves.\r\n\r\nAnd that's the fundamental flaw of a game which looks very attractive at first. Even at the slowest speed (there are three to choose from) it's impossible to maintain more than superficial control. The graphic design is exemplary - smooth scrolling, nice-looking units and easily-accessed options. But the real-time element defeats the purpose, and though it's addictive at first, disillusionment and nervous tension soon take over.\r\n\r\nThere are some odd bugs too. For instance, the instructions mention aircraft and aircraft carriers, which don't appear in the game. Dark Empire is a slick piece of programming, but maybe it wasn't properly playtested.\r\n\r\nThis is too much of a hybrid game - interesting and impressive in some respects, but ultimately too unwieldy to be entertaining.","ReviewerComments":[],"OverallSummary":"","Page":"50,51","Denied":false,"Award":"Not Awarded","Reviewers":[{"Name":"Philippa Irving","Score":"60","ScoreSuffix":"%"}],"ScreenshotText":[{"Text":"Strategy is hell in Dark Empire."}],"BlurbText":[],"TranscriptBy":"Chris Bourne","ReviewScores":[{"Header":"Presentation","Score":"90%","Text":"A wide range of options always available, professional appearance, and even some decent scrolling!"},{"Header":"Graphics","Score":"85%","Text":"More wargames should look like this - the unit 'counters' are beautiful."},{"Header":"Rules","Score":"55%","Text":"Just the back of the inlay."},{"Header":"Playability","Score":"49%","Text":"At first it's addictive, but after a while the game gets out of control."},{"Header":"Overall","Score":"60%","Text":"Initially exciting, but fundamentally flawed."}],"CompilationReviewScores":[]},{"Issue":{"Name":"Your Sinclair Issue 19, Jul 1987","Price":"£1.5","ReleaseDate":"1987-06-11","Editor":"Teresa Maughan","TotalPages":98,"HasCoverTape":false,"FlannelPanel":"Editor: Teresa Maughan\r\nSenior Art Editor: Peter George\r\nAssistant Editor: Phil South\r\nProduction Editor: Sara Biggs\r\nStaff Writer: Marcus Berkmann\r\nDesigner: Darrell King\r\nEditorial Assistant: Angela Eager\r\nContributors: Peter Berlin, Chris Donald, Mike Gerrard, Ian Hoare, Gwyn Hughes, ZZKJ, Tony Lee, John O'Molly, Rick Robson, Peter Shaw, Rachael Smith\r\nAdvertisement Manager: Mark Salmon\r\nAdvertisement Executive: Julian Harriott\r\nProduction Manager: Sonia Hunt\r\nManaging Editor: Kevin Cox\r\nPublisher: Roger Munford\r\nPublishing Director: Stephen England\r\n\r\nPublished by Dennis Publishing Ltd, [redacted] Company registered in England.\r\nTypesetters: Carlinpoint [redacted]\r\nReproduction: Graphic Ideas, London\r\nPrinters: Chase Web Offset [redacted]\r\nDistribution: Seymour Press [redacted]\r\n\r\nAll material in Your Sinclair ©1987 Felden Productions, and may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the written consent of the publishers. Your Sinclair is a monthly publication."},"MainText":"Lothlorien\n£9.95\nReviewer: Gwyn Hughes\n\nTo the hardened grongnard (that's wargamer to you) fantasy games can give rise to violent feelings quite unlike the more meditative moods of the armchair general.\n\nIn theory, the games idea is an interesting one. Starting with just one city and one army unit, you have to capture more territory of an alien planet to create greater forces.\n\nThis is combined with a scrolling map that only reveals the areas your units have covered, and a cursor and menu control system. You can tell a city to construct certain types of military unit - land, sea or air, and instruct a unit to move, attack or hold a position.\n\nAll of which could be fine, but for some sloppy thinking somewhere along the line. It starts with the instructions. Even given that Lothlorien wanted to produce an accessible game, it shouldn't have tried to cut back on the rules. The inside of the inlay card tells you so little about what you can do that I'm still not sure what all the on-screen figures are about.\n\nThe map itself is small, and it's not always obvious what's happening. When I tried to make a multiple attack on a city and the game crashed I wasn't tempted to re-load. Lothiorien was one of the first companies to back serious wargaming. Thus are the mighty fallen!","ReviewerComments":[],"OverallSummary":"","Page":"28","Denied":false,"Award":"Not Awarded","Reviewers":[{"Name":"Gwyn Hughes","Score":"4","ScoreSuffix":"/10"}],"ScreenshotText":[],"BlurbText":[],"TranscriptBy":"Chris Bourne","ReviewScores":[{"Header":"Graphics","Score":"5/10","Text":""},{"Header":"Playability","Score":"4/10","Text":""},{"Header":"Value For Money","Score":"3/10","Text":""},{"Header":"Addictiveness","Score":"3/10","Text":""},{"Header":"Overall","Score":"4/10","Text":""}],"CompilationReviewScores":[]}]}]