Item - Blazing Beacons: The Spanish Armada

As a glutton for punishment, I keep trying this series despite getting burnt each time.

As always in this series, we take an event from English history, in this case the invasion of the Spanish armada in 1588, and have you pick a side to support. In this one, you choose right from the beginning whether you'll be an English sailor or Spanish sailor (making it more similar to the You Choose series which came out much later).

It has a number of strange choices. For instance, when you are a sailor serving under Francis Drake, it often asks if you want to help attack a Spanish ship or port or sit the battle out. Would someone under a captain's command really have the option of choosing whether to participate in a battle?

There is a funny scene on British justice, when the police find you have just killed a Spaniard in a pub, they decide you let you go because it was only a Spaniard. No need for an investigation then.

But having an unchangeable historic event massively limits your outcomes. As a Spaniard, there's no way you can, say, capture or kill Sir Francis Drake, so the Spanish character is always doomed to failure.

Because of this, I often find myself choosing the silliest options just to find out how many mistakes you can make. It's a bit like the film Groundhog Day. Nothing you do really matters.

To be fair, this one is a bit better than the earlier entries, but it is still let down by the authors' dishwater dull writing style. I've read school history textbooks with livelier prose.

More reviews by Kveto