Reviews

El Cid is a poor isometric adventure featuring the epic spanish knight of the 11th century.

You must snatch a parchment from evil forces that try to use it to free Satan and take over the world. Besides you must free your lovely Jimena from them. You'll find some useful objects to accomplish the mission: a lamp, a key, money, ... The main problem is the movement which is tough, hard to move the character and combat. The weird combination of keys (K, Ent, O, S and L) don't help much, the sound is poor and the game map is a boring group of road intersections. Graphics are acceptable.

To put in a nutshell, this historical character should have deserved a better game.

El Cid [Dro Soft]
by Manuel Orcera Valero, Francis Moragrega

Bought the Mastertronic flippy/flippy tape at the time, or whatever name they gave to those Spectrum/Amstrad CPC cassettes, liked it enough to make a map. Tried it again recently, and, sorry, I still like it.

3,75/5

1987 Dro Soft (Spain)
by Manuel Valero and Francis Moragrega


When I first checked the loading and playing screen for this game I really had high expectations.
It really looked good, with nicely drawn characters and with an 11th century medieval theme which is always a nice welcome.
But being written by the Juliet software guy my expectations dropped dramatically.
Firstly you get again the same set of keys this authors likes and uses in every game. Not only they are unpractical even for the old machines they are completely useless for todays keyboards.

Then the game itself, a boring land of intersected roads or whatever, featuring always the same set of enemies, the moor, the archer, and two other classical El Cid enemies, always the same guys, almost always appear in the same places, which not only makes it predictable but boring as heck.
The adventure features getting some objects, reaching some characters like El Cid's wife, Jimena which will give him inspiration (energy), etc.
This could be enough if the game wasn't so badly written, keys are unresponsive and hard, enemies appear and dissapear by will or get trapped in some corner of the screen, just to mention a few bugs or bad choices by the author.
Despite the above average graphics and a few ideas, like the birds flying over the fields, this game is a pack of boredom.



UP...... O
DOWN.....Symbol shift
LEFT.....K
RIGHT....Enter
FIRE.....L