Crown jewels?
Along the way you'll enter jousting tournaments, be able to raid castles (for cash) and visit your old pal Robin Hood. The mini games are ok, but repetitive. I found a huge problem to be with initial character selection. Each of the four available have different stats (which stay the same throughout). The three stat categories are - Jousting - Swordplay and Leadership. These fields are rated either - Strong - Good - Average or Weak. The character I played as was an strong leader, good at jousting and weak at swordplay. This meant that raiding castle was almost impossible because of my swordplay handicap. Choosing a character who had an average jousting skill applied the same handicap to tournaments (jousting venues). Another character is average at leadership, which affects field battles - in short, one side of the game will always be redundant due to the manner of character stats.
That said though, the game can be engaging and good fun. Graphics and sound wise, it's pretty average for the SP standards, but for older gamers a virtual copy of the the 80's game. DoTC is also quite hard, even on the easy setting. More often than not, you'll find your own home castle at siege and the game over rather quickly. That said though, it is quite an addictive game, so even if you get annoyed at it, you'll find yourself playing it again a few hours later. A big shame is also DoTC's lack of multiplayer.
In a nutshell what we have here is a faithful port of 80's strategy game which will please older gamers who have already played the original, but disappoint the Advance Wars generation.