Producer: Probe Software
Retail Price: £7.95
Author: Syrox Ltd

Well aren't you the bloodthirsty little mercenary? After years of zapping, splatting, maiming and killing persons as a hitman operating illegally, you've finally been given the licence to go legal as the State has recognised your 'talents' and awarded you Bounty Hunter status.

Being in another class to the majority of inept kill-merchants employed by the State, you decide to go straight to the top and search out four extremely notorious thugs hiding on planet Zybor. Xtro II, Ariel Head, Maz Porka and Yokohama are a quartet of particularly vicious people who would soon as kill a man as look at him. Their redeeming feature, from your point of view, is the 100,000 credit bounty placed upon their ugly heads.

The official bounty hunter's kill kit includes a Mantronix: a relatively nasty cyborg that is controlled remotely by its supervisor. The main advantage over sending in a Mantronix as opposed to a real man is that if a energy blast hits it, the Mantronix won't be splurged into a mish mash of blood and string bits over the surrounding square kilometre. A Mantronix hit by an energy burst merely loses one of his nine supplied shields.

Remaining safely in your craft, placed in geostationary orbit far above the madding crowd, you can coolly and cruelly guide the remote controlled robot to the lair of the four desperados lurking on Zybor.

The view screen shows an Ultimatesque 3D view of Mantronix and his surroundings in glorious monochrome. Four-directional control is supplied, and a fire button activates a laser cannon. Mantronix moves around diagonally, and if the robot goes of screen another flips promptly into view. There are a thousand or so of these screens and Zybor's landscape is a bit bleak - nothing much survives on the surface of this planet. The laser comes in handy for despatching the mindless baddies that constantly hassle Mantronix as he plods around under your command. If a Zyborian nasty should happen to bump into Mr M, he loses a shield.

There are numerous bits of equipment hanging around Zybor's rather desolate land and picking up a certain item by wandering over it gives Mantronix the power to destroy a pulsator, the criminal team's life source. Also worth collecting are power cubes: with all eight in the possession of your robot, the conveyor belts that limit Mantronix's area of movement reverse in direction.

All the conveyor belts are totally invisible and are only detected when Mantronix puts his feet onto a section of floor that is moving, and is moved in the direction of the belt's travel. Invisible barriers also exist on the planet surface, so the scenic route is often needed to get somewhere specific...

The game is up once all four baddies have been despatched, though this is not a trivial task, considering the vast amount of wasteland to be explored.

COMMENTS

Control keys: Q, S, P, L moved in the two diagonals, 1/2 pause on/off, CAPSHIFT BREAK resets game, bottom row to fire
Joystick: Kempston, Cursor,
Fuller, Interface 2
Keyboard play: responsive
Use of colour: monochromatic playing area
Graphics: neat, detailed and jolly - playing area a bit empty
Sound: nice tunes, a few effects
Skill levels: one
Screens: 1,000 ish

Mantronix is a sort of Alien 8, but you can wander around practically where you want, apart from the invisible walls, conveyor belts and other things that are there but not on general view. The detail is of the high standard that is expected of modern day 3D graphics, but I'm afraid gameplay suffers from a lack of objects and other characters. The sound is a very well done two channel simulation on the title screen, but during play there's only the constant clicking of metal feet which got on my nerves very quickly. I found the game, as a whole, was quite fun to play but the playability could have been improved - the bounty hunting became a bit laborious after a while. Mantronix is fairly well priced at £7.95, but the more expensive versions of this type of game are probably more addictive.

At first sight I was quite impressed with this game, but I wasn't taken in by the pretty graphics for very long. Pottering around the playing area is fairly simple and finding the various items scattered around the place has more to do with luck than skill as you start off from a different place every game. Fortunately, you are provided with lots of lives at the start of the game but the nasties a re particularly vicious, so completing the game will take a lot of skill and patience. Graphically, there is nothing new here, although the graphics are quite pretty and very well detailed. I liked the sound: there are two tunes one on the title screen and one on the 'game over' screen, as well as a few spot effects. Generally, I found Mantronix a little shallow - there isn't really enough going on to keep me playing for more than a few goes at a time.

As 3D games go, Mantronix isn't that bad and compares well against the glut of such releases currently swamping the market. It's smooth and slick, recreating a full three dimensional action quite competently, though the game itself is a mite bit dull. If you're not into arcade adventures then it's very dull indeed. The game idea itself isn't very original and basically comes down to walking, shooting and collecting. Reasonably good value for fans of this type of game, I suppose.

Probe
£6.95

And that was how I got to be a bounty hunter... no, not the chocolate bars, you dopey ha'porth! We are talking intergalactic criminals, the likes of Ariel Head, Max Porka, Yokohama (I'm fine, hama you) and lets not forget XTRO II - though I'll admit it's hardly as catchy a monicker as Scarface!

All of these nefarious nasties are stranded on Zybor, a sparse planet with a checkerboard floor and many contemporary sculpture-type features on its tedious surface. There, they're protected by an advanced race of humanoids whose one role in life is to make visiting bounty hunters vanish in a puff. How vile!

All of these criminals have a price on their head (well, it helps to keep the rain off) and so you are going to go out there and reap the rewards of planetary law enforcement aren't you? Well, if you want to be a dead hero - yes. But if you're like me, you're going to use your Mantronix, a recently purchased droid that comes complete with a laser.

Mantronix beams down into this strange world with its even stranger inhabitants and almost immediately the battle is on. They'll come at you thick and fast. For every one you mow down another appears to take its place.

Each type of guard has a different attack pattern, from the floating eggs with eyes (at least that's what these hard boiled criminals look like) who like to drop on top of you, to the spikey mines who you'd rather were anybody elses because they're fast and accurate.

The last game I saw from Probe was Devil's Crown which had a short independent life before resurfacing as a Mastertronic title and at that price it was a good buy. If this one is to fare well it too would budge better at a budget price rather than in the middle range. There's so little variation in the game that it really looks like nothing more than a £1.99 offering - unless it's a recent Ultimate release!

MACHINE: Spectrum
SUPPLIER: Probe Software
PRICE: £7.95

No this isn't the game of the group of the same name. There's not even a hint of hip-hop in the music. But never fear, Probe have still come up with an extremely playable game.

Mantronix looks very Ultimate-ish. 3D diagonally scrolling graphics with lots of little bouncing, spinning deadly alien creatures to avoid and many objects to collect.

It might also remind you of Gunfight just a bit. But so what?

The basic idea is this. You are an interplanetary bounty hunter and your job is simply to hunt down wanted criminals. To help you do this you have a Mantronix - a well armed law enforcement robot. A sort of Dirty Harrydroid. Anyway, at the start of the game you find yourself on the planet Zybor - the baddies' hideout.

Zybor is a sparse planet, populated by an advanced race of humaniods, who are programmed to protect four planetary criminals - called XTRO II, Ariel Head, Max Porka and Yokohama.

Many Bounty Hunters have tried and many have failed to reap the rewards and each has suffered the same fate - death.

Equipped with a sophisticated pulse laser and a Mk. 1 autoscan camera, your Mantronix can be controlled from your combat craft. While viewing the planet's landscape and transmitting the pictures back to your craft, it can also collect valuable items and enter into combat.

You must find and terminate the four criminals before their humanoids kill your Mantronix. However, the Mantronix must also find eight power cubes which are necessary to reverse the direction of conveyor belts and essential as fuel for your homeward flight.

Death is never very far away on Zybor and you'll need a cool head and a steady joystick to survive for very long when you first start playing.

Underneath the main play screen you see your score, lives left, the number of power cubes activated and a status readout about the criminal you are currently hunting on the right-hand side. This tells you his name, crime and how many credits you'll earn by bagging him. Another similarity with Gunfight.

If you yearn for the days when Ultimate created GOOD games then this will provide a good substitute. Very playable, good value.

Probe Software
£7.95

You've finally done it - at long last you've managed to achieve Legal Combat Status and qualify as a galactic Bounty Hunter.

So like all budding bounty hunters you're ready to track down all the bad guys in the universe and rake in the rewards (not that you're doing it for the money of course, the chance to fight for truth, justice, and all that tosh is its own reward after all).

The nice thing about being a bounty hunter in 2001 AD is that you can get your remote controlled Mantronix robot to do all the dirty work for you. The Mantronix is equipped with a pulse laser for combat, and you can control its movements and actions via the Mark 1 Autoscan that allows you to observe the Mantronix at all times.

When you're hunting villains the planet Zybor is the place to be. The entire planet is populated by defence humanoids whose only purpose in life is to defend the four criminals who are hiding on the planet. Information about each of these criminals is presented on your communications console, and consists of the criminals name, nature of his crime and the bounty on his head.

The surface of the planet is seen as a series of grid-like surfaces, presented in the 3D Knightlore style graphics that are so popular these days. As you walk across the planet's surface the screen display switches quickly to show the latest section of the grid that you've moved onto. The display from your autoscan is in just two colours, to avoid attribute clashes, though the background colour varies from screen to screen.

The defence humanoids are easy to spot as they're the only things moving. They bounce around the screen, slowly homing in on you, but if you're quick on your feet you can outmanoeuvre them and get into position and blast them with your laser.

Also scattered around the planet are various obstacles, many of which are harmless in themselves, but which can slow you down if you're being chased by one of the humanoids, as well as items of treasure that can be collected to increase your credit rating. Some sections of the planet surface are impassable so you have to find alternate routes, whilst other parts conceal conveyor belts that send you trundling along, unable to change direction.

Added to all this are the power packs that are needed to fuel your craft when you leave and also to neutralise some of the objects that can kill you.

Though the animation is nice and smooth and the graphics themselves are all large and clear I must admit that I had quite a lot of trouble when it came to moving around and shooting at these things. The choice of control keys was a bit odd, and even when a Kempston joystick was used the directional controls still took a bit of getting used to with the result that at first I had to play an awful lot of games without getting anywhere just to familiarise myself with the controls. But once I became more used to the controls the pace of the game started to pick up as I go closer and closer to tracking down my quarry.

Mantronix puts less emphasis on problem solving than the Ultimate games, but it is a good tricky shoot 'em up with a large playing area that should keep our trigger finger flexing for a long time.

Probe
Shoot-'em-up
£7.95

Zybor is a rather sparsely-populated planet and manifestly about the most boring place you could ever visit. The planet consists of a number of squares with things in the middle of them. Some of those things have to be picked up, others avoided.

It is difficult to become worked up about another isometric 3D game. What is more, it does not have any problems to be solved or objects to be manipulated or graphics to admire. On the plus side, it scrolls in all directions and you can even move diagonally. That is a heavy price to pay for very few special effects. It rather looks as if someone had just sorted out how to get a 3D effect and published the game without trying to put a plot around it.

The playing area is fairly vast and there are plenty of meanies - well, one at a time, but they are fairly mean, trying to get you. The meanies don't fire but they try to crash into you. There are even a few invisible barriers and the odd magnet pulling you to your doom but nothing too taxing.

With five lives, if you can tolerate the tedium, it should be fairly easy to complete the game, but who wants to? If you really love monocolour 3D minimalist graphics, you might get some form of pleasure from this; otherwise give it a miss.