Swish...Swish-Swish! The letter Z is branded on another victim of Zorro, Johnston McCulley's famous creation which has spawned comics, television series and films, from the first 1920 production "The Mark of Zorro" to the recent 1998 "The Mask of Zorro" (with a sequel planned, production earmarked for Spring 2004).
This tie-in game for the Commodore 64 is clever: it could have been easy to make it just a sword-fighting game, but the authors have acknowledged that Zorro wasn't just about that. The main idea of the game is to rescue the poor señorita from the clutches of Sergeant Garcia, who has locked her up in his fort's tower.
The quick way of doing this would be for Zorro to swashbuckle his way through lots of enemies, fight the bad guy at the end and sweep la señora afortunada off her feet at the end. Unfortunately, it's not as easy as that!
Instead, Zorro is mainly a puzzle game, with swordfighting being a small (but necessary) part of it. The game is played over a twenty flip-screen area, with screens changing when Zorro moves off the edge (appearing at the opposite end on another).
There are several puzzles (call them sub-plots) that need to be finished before our Catherine Zeta-Jones stand-in can be rescued. Hopefully I'm not giving too much away when I mention that the first puzzle involves bouncing on a sofa with a key in your hand and jumping over a few roofs, in order to get through a locked door!
Other missions involve branding a bull, getting a bartender drunk, collecting crucial items (like a handkerchief), returning the stolen bells from the Mission building, navigating your way through some caves (this is a tricky platform sub-game that spot-on jumping skills) and freeing prisoners from Garcia's jail.
There are guards that patrol a number of screens; some of these can be avoided by staying out of their way and working out the sequence that they walk in, but sometimes it's down to brawn over brains. With your sword in your hand, you fight the guards by pressing fire when your sword is crossed with theirs, pointing downwards (i.e. forming a shallow "V" sign). You can also push the joystick towards the guard to catch him off-balance, making him walk backwards. This is essential for one particular part of the game.
If you are carrying an item (except for the handkerchief), you cannot carry your sword at the same time, so it is sheathed at this point. If you need your sword in a hurry, pressing Fire with drop the item you are carrying and Zorro will immediately unsheath his sword again.
There isn't a time limit as such, but there is a bonus counter which gradually whittles down. The quicker you complete one of the tasks, the more bonus points you get. The bonus counter starts at 2,200 points for the first task, and 9,900 points thereafter. However, the counter never drops below 1,000 points.
This is a good all-round game, and people who like games that make them think will love this. Datasoft have proven themselves as being able to mix arcade action with strategy (The Goonies being another of their creations), and this is no exception. Zorro is dressed all in black, which makes him easy to make out against the nicely-drawn old Californian Spanish-inspired buildings. The guards can be quite hard to make out, but this is an intentional ploy to make the game harder.
You can also choose whether to listen to the music (which gets repetitive after a while) or spot SFX (which serve their purpose, albeit sparsely) by pressing S while in the game. Controls are by joystick in Port 1.
Zorro is a great little thinking-man's platform game that will have puzzle fans coming back for more. People who just want to jump around and fight, however, might find the puzzles getting in the way after a while.
