Conquests of the Longbow: The Legend of Robin Hood

The Good
I have always liked the legend of Robin Hood, so when this game came out, naturally I had to get it. The artwork for this game was the best I had ever seen at the time, and I still love looking at it. It had some very wonderful music, as well. But the thing I found the most surprising was what had been written into the game. I played this game three times, once to get a feel for it, once to be the best Robin hood I could be, and once to be the absolute worst Robin Hood I could be. Yeah, yeah, I know--not exactly what Robin Hood's about, right? However, I found that the game had been written with that in mind--if you didn't rescue certain people, then your failure triggered a different event--maybe some little bit of dialogue that tells you what happened to that person, or something like that. It's impossible to fail completely in this game if you want to get to the end trial, though, but the crowd of people will be much smaller. I was still very surprised, though, because most of Sierra's games are made with the premise in mind that you have to solve one puzzle to get to the next--but here they've made the game more flexible, in my opinion, by allowing you to fail if you can't figure it out. It isn't easy to get full points, but you don't have to in order to win the game. Varying difficulty levels made things like the archery contest a real challenge!

The Bad
Winning the game and marrying Marian was a different matter, though. You do have to get the full points to marry her. Otherwise, you're just made a yeoman. Also, there is one point where you would get stuck if you didn't do what you were supposed to--if you didn't rescue Marian the first time you met her, you could not continue with the game. There were also some odd elements in the game that I didn't really identify with being a part of the actual legend of Robin Hood. There is also a point in the game where you have to click the hand icon on Robin, and sometimes what was supposed to come up wouldn't, unless you clicked in a very narrow area.

The Bottom Line
This was a very beautiful game for its time, very well thought out and dimensionalized. You were given a broader range of how to play Robin Hood if you wanted to. The puzzles were sometimes difficult, sometimes easy, but all in all a lot of fun. I played this game in one sitting, in one entire day--and it's not easy to keep my attention that long!