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One of the things that I judge a program by is what the producers claim for it. Woodbury End is an adventure game which falls miserably short of the company's hype: "The game... has highly user-friendly gameplay... How many adventures are there for the Electron with graphics, extensive text description, real time events and independent characters." Sounds pretty good, eh? Well, let's examine each claim in turn.

This "highly user-friendly" game is presented on a Mode 5 screen with its horrible, unreadable 20 character text. Exits are not given, and so must tediously be tried in every location. The parser, which is limited to two word inputs, is one of the worst I have seen. The vocabularly is very small and the program is quite unable to distinguish between words it doesn't know and combinations that it cannot act upon.

The claim to "graphics" - lies in the fact that one corner of the screen displays crude line drawings of certain objects when they are examined. That's it - no pictures of the scenery at all. As to the "extensive text descriptions", location descriptions and messages average about six words of unreadable Mode 5 text each.

I can't say that I cared much for the play in the game either. The characters are "independent" in that they are not usually around when you need them. I would hardly recommend the "real time" element as an attractive feature either. A clock in the corner progresses on some arbitrary and unfathomable time scale over which one has no apparent control. You can't, for example, pass time by using a sophisticated command like WAIT ("Don't confuse me", cries the pathetic parser), even though you are required to be at certain places at specific times.

Regular readers will appreciate how much I enjoy a good adventure game. Woodbury End would have sustained my interest for about ten minutes if I hadn't needed to review it. If I had read the hype and paid real money for it, I would have been pretty furious.

Jonathan Evans