This one was a free bonus game that came with the Zenobi Software text adventure "Behind Closed Doors 2: The Sequel". I don't know the story behind how this arrangement came about, but I can see that this game probably was not deemed quite good enough to be sold as a separate title. Also, with Zenobi being better known as purveyors of text adventures, people might have mistakenly thought that this is a text game also. It isn't.
This game apparently was constructed using "3D Game Maker" from CRL. Indeed, it looks like the sort of effort that would typically be made with that system and I can tell by observing the inner workings that the usual 3D Game Maker datafiles are indeed present here. What I can't fully understand is how this was produced, given that the vanilla 3D Game Maker system never let the end user create standalone game titles. Usually, the creator's sprite data and room layouts had to be loaded into the system manually to play the games, making their efforts generally impossible to distribute. So then, like many of the other similar titles out there, I can only speculate that the "3D Game Maker" system was somehow modifed to make a standalone "runtime" that autoloads and plays the designed game without any user intervention. (If only CRL had done this in the first place, their system may have been far more popular!).
The game itself is not very good. Coming after so many far better classic isometric games, this one pales in comparison. My main criticisms are that the game uses rotational controls rather than directional ones, which I personally find less natural to use. You only get one single life which is very harsh. You can sometimes get trapped by moving sprites that hem you in, but do not kill you. The instructions don't mention that you have to press 'A' to quit the game when this happens. The intro screen unfortunately looks better than the game itself, being multicoloured although the game itself is monochrome.
It's just not very enjoyable to play, because you have a feeling that the odds are stacked rather too much against the player. Although the sprites are really well drawn, the setting is a bit of a "mashup" of strange concepts. There's something odd really about playing a upright bear walking past TV cameras and lethal toy tanks. I'm also not used to having to press joystick-down to fire a projectile (in this case, a bubble).
On the plus side, the sprite animations are very well done and there are quite a large number of rooms to explore, but overall this game falls short of most isometric offerings.
