The Shadow Of Zorro

I remember spending a weekend way back in digital prehistory playing a Zorro game on my Amstrad 464. It wasn't a very good weekend. The game was a crap version of the far superior Bruce Lee where a masked dot zoomed across the screen and didn't do much else. Well, fifteen years later and the dot has mutated into an impressive polygonal model but the gameplay has actually taken a turn for the worse. We can skip little niggles like transplanting the story from it's rightful Californian setting (back when it belonged to Mexico), to Spain. We can even forgive the ludicrous combat method where cursor directions appear on screen and you have to press the buttons quickly. After all, the game is aimed at a wide console audience and the rather tasty Shenmue on the Dreamcast employed a similar method. What we can't let pass is the most inept control system we've ever come across and gameplay that takes Tomb Raider and lands it on its arse. Not that we could get far enough to discover any hidden depths. The controls are such a donkey it's like performing brain surgery with your feet. With socks on. Underwater. You have to rotate and move forwards (moving backwards isn't even an option) while trying to spin the god-awful camera with the mouse or put up with facing the wrong way constantly. Guards are everywhere, either sleeping like lifelong narcoleptics or screaming at you like maniacal retards. And, get this, running them through with your sword just knocks them unconscious for a minute or so, making the already difficult exploration impossible. Zorro means fox in Spanish, but this is about as cunning as one of Baldrick's plans.