Format: Flash
Developer: Preloaded
www.channel4.com/programmes/1066

Education is an area a developer explores at its own risk, since nothing takes the edge off fun as swiftly as the lurking suspicion that someone might be secretly trying to teach you something. Unless you’re packing the friendly, low-polygon head of a notable Japanese neuroscientist, players used to all manner of wonky minimaps and ill-paced checkpoints tend to flee if they receive even the slightest indication that they’re about to be instructed in Solfège syllables. Equally, no amount of cutscene spectacle will stop an audience’s eyes from glazing over as George Stobbart explains 19th century Chiaroscuro techniques.

All of which means that 1066 enters the battlefield from a position of weakness. Not only does the game have a name that clearly associates it with the dim landmarks of history and the questionable activities of re-enactment aficionados, but as a Flash collaboration between digital media specialists Preloaded and UK TV station Channel 4, it’s contractually obligated to lay on the learning a little before the first flaming arrow has been fired.

A turn-based strategy game set around the Battle of Hastings, 1066 sees you choosing an army from the ranks of English, Vikings or Normans, and playing through either single- or multiplayer skirmishes. Using a 2D side-scrolling perspective, the whole thing’s a bit of an oddity - the silhouetted presentation makes it look a little like a Patapon sequel with visual design outsourced to the National Trust. And, just so neither historian nor gamer truly feels at home, conflicts are controlled by a grid-based interface that runs along the bottom of the screen. But the battles that unfold are engaging and varied regardless of how interested you are in exploring the military thinking and combat traditions of the later dark ages.

Crowbarring in rhythm action sections for close-up combat, and a little mouse-based aiming for flinging arrows through the air, the end result is as much a primer in contemporary game design trends for historians as it is an exploration of history for gamers. It’s heavy on the taunts (carried out by typing your oaths, Typing Of The Dead-style) and bloody aspects of the conflict – though the conflicts themselves were fairly heavy on these aspects too – and features a trembling voiceover by Ian “Bilbo Baggins” Holm himself, who even calls the England of the period Middle Earth.

As such, 1066 occasionally lowers itself to make the muddy past appear sexy and vivid, but the game also has the admirable sense of a venerable genre coming full circle. After all, as any decent historian can tell you, back before Advance Wars, Dune 2, and even chess, we used to have a different name for strategy games. We used to call them ‘war’.