Alcazar: The Forgotten Fortress

The Good
Alcazar: The Forgotten Fortress is one of the last games released for the ColecoVision, as the only game released in 1985 and only three being released in the following year. You are an adventurer on a map-screen filled with colour-coded castles and several roads connecting them. There are a few shortcut points (a large lake, two broken bridges, and two flying carpets each from a point A to a point B, and each requiring an item to cross them, which is consumed in the use).

The castles are filled with several items and several monsters guarding them. You begin with a varying number of guns depending on the level of difficulty you selected, with six bullets in each gun. You can find more along the way, but the items are finite while the monsters reset each time you exit, and re-enter a given castle.

The object is to get the large castle on the far side of the map by travelling through castles and/or crossing at the various shortcut points, and finding your way to the throne room, which of course is also guarded.

The graphics were passable, although it was difficult to know what some of the monsters and items were supposed to be. The music had a vaguely Arabic feel, and it was supposed to be left-over treasures from an Islamic France, so it fit with the story.

There were several types of items you could find in specific-coloured castles, and each was useful to accomplish a task as well as to defeat a specific type of monster. Guns could be used for any monster, but it would take a different number of bullets to kill each type of monster.

The Bad
You need the manual to keep track of all the different-coloured castles, items, monsters, shortcuts, etc. And you need to pause the game often while you look them up. I suppose after a while you'd have it all memorised, but it would take a lot of time playing the game for it all to stick.

I also found that since all nearby monsters would converge on you if you used your gun (since it was noisy and alerted them to your presence), you could easily get overwhelmed with difficult monsters, all of which would chase you from room to room. And since the guns and bullets are so limited, you would run out of bullets, since you could only hold up to four items at a given time. And switching items while being chased was impossible since you need to stop moving to switch items. The controls could have been improved, even on the limited controllers common in the second generation.

It was an interesting game, but I found it too difficult to make it worth gaining the skill necessary to beat it. If it were the eighties and I didn't have many games, I'd find more enjoyment in it, but its complexity works against it as a retro game competing with the likes of The Legend of Zelda, Spiderman, Tomb Raider, and a plethora of other great action-adventure games for older systems.

The Bottom Line
Alcazar: The Forgotten Fortress is a complex action-adventure game that absolutely requires the manual to enjoy at all, and while ok overall, it just doesn't have enough to keep me wanting to come back for more.