Download Feud

Once upon a time in a small village two brothers were living. Their names were Learic and Leanoric. Both of them liked to gather knowledge about ancient mysteries of alchemy. They were reading old manuscripts, collecting rare herbs and even more rare trophies from different animals. Together they mixed ingredients and prepared magical fluids. Some of village inhabitants liked brothers, some were scared of them. Magic is not an easy stuff. Not every mixture was giving good effects - many experiments ended with poisonous venoms or even worse exploding features. 

One day big explosion occurred in their home. Both of them ran away from fire. Their hut burnt down to ashes. No one knows what happened that day, but since then brothers went apart. They stopped talking to each other. Thing got even worse - brothers started to fight between each other. 

The story of Feud may not be as described above, but this where your game starts. You have a chance to get into Learic shoes and fight Leanoric using magic spells. Both of You have equal chances to kill one another. No differences has been noticed between characters. 

Idea of the game is quite simple. You need to collect herbs and other mysterious ingredients to create spells from them. To pick an ingredient you need to walk into one from it's bottom. This is not the simplest way it has been implemented - sometimes it's frustrating to walk through a maze and realize that you approach herb from top of it and can't pick it up. If you find the mazes too difficult on site should also be a map. I could say that the world is round - you can go always to the right, up or different direction (avoiding obstacles of course) constantly and you'll get to the place you started after some screens. In real - the game world is rectangular :) 

On left side of the bottom of the screen you can see your spellbook. There are 12 spells. Each spell is made from 2 herbs. If you have ingredient in your sack - name of it will be highlighted. What should You do to make a spell? Do You remember big cauldron near your home? This is a place to combine a spell. You need to select proper page from your spellbook, have both of the ingredients in your sack (highlighted in the book) and press the fire button. Ingredients will be lost and the spell name will be highlighted. Now you can use it. Some of the spell are offensive and can inflict damage to Leanoric (Fireball, Lightning), some of them can be described as defensive (Heal, Invisible) and some of them are just helpful (teleport). In the down-right corner there is a compass. Arrow on it shows direction to Leanoric. 

Not only two fighting magicians are in the game. There are also some townsmen. They walk around their pre-defined routes, and with use of magic you can make some of them to help you (your foe also can). Beware! One of them can drain your life when You'll get into his garden. Best herbs can make you pay ... with your life. 

Graphics are simple but nice. Everything is clear and easy to recognize. I really like the way life-meter is shown on screen. Both brothers are shown on the bottom of the screen. When their life is lowered the picture showing him is also getting smaller. It looks like he is being buried. After death gravestone picture replaces image of the person. Controls are shown before the game starts, and can't be redefined. In my opinion the layout of controls could be better. I haven't heard any music or sound ... 

In my opinion there should a multiplayer mode. It would be very nice to fight with another living person, not only with a computer. Probably in 1988 it was difficult to put this kind of feature into game. Game was released to many platforms (Commodore 64, Amiga, MSX, Atari and others) and as far as I know none of the conversions had multiplayer option. 

Feud is quite fun, but have some disadvantages. I can't tell why, but I enjoyed this title a lot more on C64. Maybe I'm currently a lot older, maybe the PC version is not that good. All in all overall score will be only 3. Download it and try it by yourself to check if I'm right :)