Reviews

Starting life as a magazine type-in game, after a bit of tarting up, Conquest was one of the launch titles for Cheetah's short-lived software label. It's fairly typical of the sort of strategy that we got in the early days of the Spectrum. I suppose you could think of it as an early, and rather primitive, forerunner to the likes of Civilization.

There's a fairly nice-looking single screen map of Europe and the Mediterranean, around which you get to build your empire, although it looks a lot pretty once you start expanding across it a character square at a time. You start out with a single legion and, as you occupy more territory, you'll accumulate more of them. However, you'll have to deal with barbarian uprisings, rebel legions, civil wars and at the highest level plague.

On the down-side, the game is written in BASIC and consequently rather slow. This is most apparent when the plague breaks out as it can take a couple of minutes per turn to resolve. Still, so long as you avoid the plague, by not playing at the top level, it remains reasonably playable.

It's not a bad game to play if you've got a bit of patience, but it hasn't exactly aged gracefully and there are some much better games along the same lines; Dark Empire and Annals of Rome are a couple that spring immediately to mind.

1984 Cheetahsoft (UK)
by Duncan Nightingale

A fairly typical strategy game from the early days of the Spectrum, Conquest was also one of the earliest titles for the short-lived Cheetah software label.

The game revolves around a single map of Europe with it's surrounding seas, and the object of the game is to build an empire, starting out with just one legion but, as you defeat enemies and occupy their territory, you'll became bigger and powerful with chances of dominating the entire continent. Of course you'll have to deal with other legions, most of them barbarian. There is also the danger of being completely decimated by the plague.

The game requires a bit of patience as all strategy games from this era do, specially because it's written in BASIC making it rather slow sometimes, but that doesn't detract anything from the game, just makes it a bit slow.

It's true, there are better and more modern war strategy Spectrum games out there, but like Football Manager, this remains one of the first of it's kind and it's always a pleasure to play it.