Targhan

STORY / GAMEPLAY
Targhan, a barbarian warrior and son of a tribal leader, fights his way through a mythical world against other warriors, archers, bats and enormous monsters. His main quest is to find and avenge the evil lord that terrorized his village and claims the whole territory for himself. The game is divided into 4 levels. Targhan travels through forests, dark dungeons (where he needs a light source), tree-houses and finally the castle of the evil lord. The game is a mixture of fighting action and killing enemies with your sword and shurikens; you'll encounter scrolls which give you clues, and other objects to help you in your quest. But to get there is not so easy.Overall, it's a standard action adventure that has some nice graphical effects and a quite difficult gameplay, which is a standard recipe of almost all Silmarils' games! Although the game boasts of "more than 120 landscapes and 40 different characters" as its advertisement says, repetitive levels and cardboard-cutout characters make it feel a lot smaller. Its great graphics and atmospheric sound though saves the day I think.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The CPC version features stunning graphics with plenty of colorful and nicely drawn backgrounds and sprites, considering its hardware limitations, and most of the details are taken from the original (Amiga, ST) game. Sprite animations are fine to amazing but the CPC hardware straggles when more than two sprites appear on screen, resulting in slow-downs and a rather frustrating gameplay during fighting (which is something normal here). Fortunately the game runs in flip-screen mode, which probably saves the day,. otherwise frame-rate would be even worst! Note that the game runs only on 128k systems and comes in 2 disks. The sound features a nice introductory theme and a few spot SFX during gameplay, mostly consisting of character footsteps and enemy hitting sounds.