An accident at the power plant threw a city into mass hysteria and now it's your task to escape out of it all in one piece.
Nice - if rare - graphics, out-of-the ordinary puzzles and locations (even a zoo!) make After Shock a good adventure of average difficulty. The only niggle I found is that descriptions are short and basic, and the unusual setting of the game could have made the way for some real literature. However I found it's the case with many Interceptor adventures.
by David M. Banner, Terry Greer
I've always found the apocalyptic situation inviting and desirable, especially the looting aspect of it: during the confusion and the chaos I could have assaulted a shop of Spectrum stuff. And After Shock would have been one of the games I'd grab. It's a catastrophist adventure game set in California - I think - where an earthquake, probably the Big One, has just hit. As if that wasn't enough, Fukushima-style, in the outskirts of your town there's a nuclear reactor too, damaged by the sismic event and hence ready to cause more destruction.
Accidentally, you're one of the engineers that designed the reactor, and so you take it on yourself to reach the place, repair the damage and avert the danger. Here's where the first problem arises, you're at your office, in a high building on fire, stairs blocked by the flames and out of order elevators. How are you going to get out? It's an intriguing start, as the whole concept and adventure. Unluckily, you're probably going to get already stuck here, the parser seems to be slightly limited on the synonyms side, while at the same time, it requires articulated sentences with prepositions and specific terms to get past some crucial points.
If you manage to get out of the building, anyway, you can wander among the ruins and visit the local zoo too, and find many items, some of which are just random objects littered around by the disaster, and not really helpful or necessary to solve the game. If you manage to go past the pile of rubble you'll even learn that the looter's life is not much fun, when you meet troops deployed to defend the rich block. And that if you meet a gang of looters you'd better make them think that you're one of them. So, it's an intriguing adventure, with nice and vaguely literary descriptions, splendid pictures [albeit rare], but a bit too much frustrating, for this reviewer.
3,5/5
A text adventure game themed by post-apocalyptic settings, where survival is your quest. It's a good game within the genre with nice pieces of texts and nicely presented. The theme is quite inviting although gripping, a massive earthquake shocks a city, the main nuclear power plant is intact but threatened, our hero who helped design the cooling system of the power plant has to make his way out of the city, reach the power plant and repair the cooling system. The game tells the story in a much cooler way. If you love this kind of games you will surely like After Shock.
