Archers : The

Copyright : Level 9 Computing Ltd | Reviewed by : Ritchardo

If they put you in charge of The Archers, how would you change life in Ambridge? Here?s your chance to find out by taking on the roll of story editor and making plot decisions for Jack Woolley, Eddie Grundy, Elizabeth Archer and Nelson Gabriel. You?re in charge but you?ll have to face the consequences of your decisions. They may cause a stir in The Bull - or in Broadcasting House - watch out for the memos from the Controller of Radio 4 and see how you fare in the charts!

Based on the longest running soap opera in the world (The Archers dates back to New Year?s Day 1951 and has featured over 13,000 episodes!!!), this interactive fiction is an unofficial follow-up to Level 9?s Adrian Mole games.

Graphics

Although primarily a text game, the events of the story are accompanied by regularly changing graphics in the top half of the game window that depict (with varying success) what is going on in the game. The drawings are fairly crude and along with the mode 1 text make the game appear, to the casual observer at least, to be made with the Graphic Adventure Creator (which of course it wasn?t!).

Most of the drawings are made up of straight lines and it feels a bit like a drably coloured etch-a-sketch. In actual fact the poor colour scheme is the biggest problem as it makes the game appear very dull (which I?m sure isn?t too far from the truth for some people) thanks to the dark reds and greens which dominate the pictures.

Sound

None.

Gameplay

Similar in structure to the Adrian Mole games, The Archers is more of an interactive book than a computer game as you are offered a number of options which steer the story down a different path before re-joining the central plot somewhere further down the line.

In the short term I found The Archers to be an enjoyable experience as although I know next to nothing about the programme (and particularly how the programme was in the mid-eighties), the storyline is well written and has plenty of humour. Inevitably there are two ways to play as you go through each scenario and uncover new paragraphs of text.

Where this game scores over Adrian Mole?s exploits is that you can?t progress until you?ve achieved your aim of adding a million listeners and this can be very difficult, particularly in the third section of the game, meaning you have a real challenge to try and play the whole game and read everything. Another big plus over Mole is that the scenario is completely fresh and there?s no repetition of material (as fans of the Adrian Mole books who have played the games will be only too aware).

In the end though, the random occurance of some incidents can make it difficult to progress and you may have to restart a section through no real fault of your own but a poor draw of events. Couple this with the fact that the game assumes that you already have a strong understanding of the characters in the game means that it?ll take some amount of trial and error to work out what each character is likely to do in a situation or react to what course of action.

The main problem though is that no matter how witty the text, the game is very limited in that after a couple of hours of solid play you?ll have read just about everything and as there?s no real gameplay to speak of there?s nothing left to do!

If you?re a fan of The Archers or the Adrian Mole games, you?ll love it but if you prefer your games to have a bit more action or brainwork then I?d give it a miss.