Reviews

It feels like a guilty pleasure becuase Karnov looks too colourful to be a Sectrum game. It only just feels like you are playing on a Spectrum. The programmers (incredibly its Mr Micro of Punchy fame) used the same cell-based technique pioneered in shooter Lightforce and turned out a remarkable conversion of a far from famous arcade game. Full colour when all others were doing mono and all 9 arcade levels in short multiloads when all bar R-Type were finding excuses to cut corners.
Karnov is essentially a run and gun game where you fire at everything with all of the power ups at you disposal learning the enemies attack patterns. But it its more than that as you can always prop up a ladder and discover more things to collect or secret passageways, alternative routes.
The game is beautiful to look at and improbably huge. See the map at World of Spectrum to witness both. And it is very playable with crackling FX throughout.
The YS reviewer got the game perfectly. Crash were caught out. It is easy to snub the game when you first see Karnov jump his slow cell-block jump. But get going and the floaty style allows all sorts of new problems and tactics to solve them and it is perfectly in keeping with the dreamy setting drawn out of Russian folklore.
Karnov is the best game of its type on the Spectrum and publisher Electric Dreams deserve a bigger reputation for such labours of love such as this game and RType together with originals such as Spindizzy and Hijack.

Not the fastest jump'n'shoot game on the Speccy, and not the most fluid animation, but big, colorful sprites with very little colour clash, and beautiful backgrounds, which form a landscape that cointains at least two routes to finish each level, and portions that can only be explored by using ladders or "jumping shoes", to find, for example, useful objects literally "hidden in the sky" - which increases the interest in the game, and adds depth.

There are enough weapons, levels, routes and monsters to keep you occupied for a while, if you want get to the end of it.

Me, personally, I'm stuck in the third level since who-remembers-when...

But, examining Pavero's maps I've seen that there's lot ahead, particulary a beautiful submarine level.

Which I'll see one day. Well, maybe.

A superb conversion of a not-so-well-known Data East coin-op featuring a fire-breathing Russian on a dangerous path leading to the long lost treasure of Babylon guarded by a fearsome dragon.

Karnov is a huge game - 9 large levels full of enemies and traps, no less - and features large, colorful and defined graphics, although 1-character block moving does not make animation and scrolling very smooth. However, there is so much variety and surprise in this title that you will be hooked to the screen just to see what comes next.

Karnov and I have never got on. I will give it credit, it looks gorgeous, but gameplay is what counts here and Karnov's gameplay is pretty arse. His floaty jumping is offputting as is the scrolling, it just makes the game more awkward than it needs to be for me to enjoy it, it did 26 years ago and it still does today. Many would see away these drawbacks and like it simply for the impressive non colour clash graphics, but not me, because you can be in HD for all I care, if your game plays like shit you will be shit, as Karnov has found out. And I still struggle to find the purpose of Karnov being Data East's mascot after all these years. That's like making Egghead the ZX Spectrum mascot rather than Dizzy.