Producer: Ariolasoft
Retail Price: £8.99
Author: 39 Steps

Not on the side of the angels (for once), you must penetrate the orbital prison of Triaxos and free the only man alive who can activate the galaxy's most powerful weapon.

The inlay doesn't give a reason for all this, but yours is not to question why... oh, and you've got just 30 minutes to complete the job.

Triaxos is composed of 64 isometric 3-D flick screens, each representing one small block. A 3-D cube at the screen's top displays your position on Triaxos.

The blocks contain pulse-firing protecting droids, programmed on five levels, but luckily you didn't forget to pack a droid-destroying blaster.

Some blocks have a 'face-lift' device which alters the orientation of the room, shown on a lower screen display, turning walls into ceilings and vice versa. Using this, other rooms can be accessed - and you can avoid falling to your death through apertures in the floors.

In one block there's a cloning booth that allows you to replicate and so guard yourself against possible death, but using it drains your personal power.

But most importantly you must collect the tour components of a laser capable of destroying the mind probe which approaches to interrogate your target...

COMMENTS

Control keys: A left/up, Z right/down, N left/down, M right/up, SPACE to fire
Joystick: Kempston, Interface 2
Use of colour: monochromatic playing area; choice of background colours not liked
Graphics: small sprites, unimaginatively drawn
Sound: light on spot FX
Skill levels: one
Screens: 64

Yet another 3-D isometric puzzle-solving game, with the usual monochromatic graphics, Triaxos can best be described as 'average and offering no real innovations'. Control of the central character is awkward and movement is painfully slow, lowering playability - you get bored waiting for him to cross a room.
ROBIN

Triaxos is one of a long line of logic-based arcade games. The usual mixture of puzzles and strategy is there, but it didn't keep me interested for long. The graphics are above average, though the sprites could have been clearer, but the intro tune is horrible.
MARK

What a boring game this is - about as exciting as watching paint dry, and getting a headache in the process from the programmers' unappealing colours. The plot's too thin to involve - just blowing up a few aliens is not my idea of fun.
NICK

39 Steps
£8.99

If you can imagine a game that's a cross between Mission Impossible and Lionel Richie's 'Dancing on the Ceiling' video, then you might just come up with Triaxos.

Triaxos is a space station cum high-security prison where the one man who can activate the galaxy's most powerful weapon is being held. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to penetrate Triaxos, locate the prisoner, and bring him out alive - before the mind-probe that's on its way arrives to turn his brain into jelly. You're playing against the clock, with a thirty minute time counter ticking away on screen. The mind-probe docks at the station ten minutes into the game so that means you've also got to locate the four parts of the special probe-laser so that you can destroy the probe too (I think its gonna be one of those days...)

Of course, no self-respecting prison would be complete without a collection of droids to guard the place and zap any intruders, so you'll need to keep your finger on the trigger and defend yourself from attack. The droids on the early levels are fairly slow and easy to avoid, but they do get deadlier the further into the station you get. Fortunately there's a conveniently placed Cloning Booth which can provide you with extra lives, as well as the odd grenade and supplies of high-explosives that are scattered around the place.

A three-dimensional display in one corner of the screen shows your position within the station, but what complicates things are the Face Lifts. No, I'm not talking about Liz Taylor - these Face Lifts are located in certain rooms and can change the direction of gravity so that the floor becomes a wall, walls become floors and ceilings and existing doorways become potentially deadly trapdoors.

The change in gravity does have its advantages, though. If you want to go down to the next floor and there's no way down you can just drop a grenade and blow a hole in the floor. Then you find a Lift, rotate gravity, and all of a sudden the room downstairs becomes the room next door.

Triaxos isn't exactly the world's fastest shoot 'em up, but then the 39 Steps label was set up by Ariolasoft for games with more of a strategy slant, so that's to be expected. It's more of a puzzle really, with a bit of zapping thrown in for variety, but while the gravity switching device is quite novel it's not enough to put Triaxos in the megagame league.

Label: Ariolasoft
Price: £8.99
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Tamara Howard

Triaxos just about the meanest, nastiest, highest-securitiest prison complex in the galaxy. And you've got to go there and break somebody out. Because he's the only guy who knows how to operate the most powerful weapon ever made, and you need the information before the enemy get it.

So you are transported on the complex and you've got thirty minutes to get the hell out of there with the prisoner. But there's an additional problem. The other side have got a dastardly mind probe (remind you of a certain scene in a certain hugely popular SF film?) and it's arriving in ten minutes to extract the info in the most unpleasant way possible So the race is on.

At first glance, Triaxos appears to be just another 3D room game, and a pretty dull at that. But stay with it. There's a lot going on.

It has all the popular elements: walk about a bit, fire at things that fire at you, fire at things that don't fire at you, pick up things and rescue people.

But it's not an easy game.

Triaxos is set up as an enlarged Rubik's Cube sort of thing. You begin at the air lock and take out a few grade 1 droids, recognisable by the large number one painted on them. You roll around a few rooms, waste a few droids, step on a strange square in the floor and disappear!

This is a face-lift, not as you might think, a popular American surgical procedure for rejuvenating octogenarians, but a transporter sort of machine. It can dematerialise you, turn the room upside down, rematerilaise you, and thing take on a whole new perspective. The face lift is particularly useful when you materialise in a room with no apparent exits. Because then you can blow a hole in the floor, turn the room around, make the hole a door and just walk through into the next room.

A word of warning here. If you find yourself in a room without a face lift, you're going to have to jump through the hole. But if you can possibly avoid it, do. Because you might well blow a hole above another hole, fall through two floors and end up as a splattered mess. So take care.

Game play is, er, slow, it takes a good few seconds for a bullet to travel across the screen. But you have to think quite hard about which way to turn, so it's probably just as well that you aren't being bombarded from all sides.

Keeping a map to the rooms is a sensible idea, if you can do it while you're being turned around and materialised upside down. Drawing maps whilst standing on your head is a tricky business.

Triaxos is not going to win awards for being completely, brilliant, but it's a good solid sort of game, with a combination of cunning and brutal aggression necessary to win.