 Ever wonder what a game like Lemmings would be like with more of a strategy and adventure slant? Here's King Arthur's World, developed by Argonaut Games, the same people who developed the Super FX chip. King Arthur's World doesn't utilize that, but it is a unique blend of puzzle solving and real time strategy, and yes it's like Lemmings as you can clearly see from the viewing angle, but the characters you control aren't mindless Lemmings, they're units that actually display some intelligence and can fight back against enemies. The story has you play as King Arthur freeing three neighboring kingdoms which are each ruled by crazy tyrants who enslave their people, but beyond that you're drawn into the caves of the goblin underworld and from there into the cloud world where you fight all kinds of oddball aliens and demons. The key to making a game like this approachable is making the controls intuitive, and while each function isn't made immediately obvious, the controls are still reasonably well done. The X button displays the different characters you can create, everything from archers to knights to engineers, and you press B to actually create them, and of course they start mindlessly wandering off immediately, but you can press the D pad in the opposite direction to get them to sit still. Hold the A button while a character is selected to pick an action for them to do, and press B to carry out the order. Hold the Y button and press a direction on the D pad to switch characters on the screen. You have a limit of three characters or groups you can have on screen at once, but you do have the option of switching them out for something else if you made a mistake, or if the level calls for something else. Just like Lemmings, timing is in the name of the game here, so it's important to get a hang of the controls as quickly as you can, so you have a better chance of progressing. The game starts with a series of training stages, which normally I'd say are kind of a nuisance, but they aren't too long, they're pretty painless, and they actually do a decent job preparing you for some of the scenarios you'll be encountering, like blowing up doors with a barrel of dynamite, or building catapults in the right spots to relaunch projectiles. You send out each type of unit one at a time from this tent here, archers and foot soldiers are self-explanatory, but there's engineers, which can build everything from catapults, battering rams and platforms to reach otherwise unreachable areas. There's barrel men, which drop a barrel of TNT to blow up obstacles, but if they're hit they explode like they've mixed pop rocks and coke. The light wizard can heal, while the dark wizard does attack spells, but they're both destroyed easily if they're not protected by knights who can utilize their shields. You don't just simply walk to the left or right though, like in Lemmings, you have to be wary of enemy soldiers who indiscriminately fire their weapons, and you also have to deal with all kinds of traps and pitfalls. Thankfully there is no time limit here, you simply have to keep King Arthur alive and get him past all the obstacles to the end of the stage. There's a total of 23 levels here spread out across three worlds, and there is a password system here as well. And even better, this game is compatible with the SNES mouse, which makes the controls much quicker and more tolerable, and speeds the pace of play up pretty well. One thing you gotta keep in mind with this one is to be careful with fire, and by proxy be careful with how you use the barrel men and catapults. Yeah, it's cool to just blow stuff up like these spiked obstacles here, but fire spreads very quickly here, burning down the roofs of these houses, which is a nice effect, but it can quickly wipe out a ton of your units if you're not careful. There's a lot of friendly fire here too. Even ladders can burn up and leave you stuck, and in addition to that, the Dark Wizard spell can damage your own units. Flaws in King Arthur's world are pretty apparent right away. First of all, this game is very slow, and some of the early training stages are going to test your patience, like when you defeat all the enemies and sit there and wait for King Arthur to waddle his ass all the way to the end. That gets annoying. Also, there's quite a bit of luck involved in progressing through this one. For instance, if you need a specific type of unit to get to a particular area, you'd better send as many as you can, because they're likely to get picked off by enemy projectiles which fly in at random. That part can get really frustrating. Really, it's just the speed of the game overall, but I will say having the mouse when playing this one helps a lot. So if you find this one too slow, try playing it that way. Overall, I think King Arthur's world is worth playing today because there aren't many other 16-bit games like it. I always enjoy when a game of this era is ambitious enough to try real-time strategy, and I think King Arthur's world does a good enough job. This game can really be stressful at times because there's so much you gotta manage at once. All spread out across some huge maps. But man, if you get the hang of it, this game can feel very rewarding because some of the maps here are pretty involved and fun to play through. But like I said, the flaws here are made pretty obvious right away, and the game's slower pace and mindless enemy AI may be dealbreakers for some people. Still, I think this one is worth playing. It's another one of those genre-defying games that's tough to put your finger on, and there's not really another game quite like it in the Super Nintendo library.