Reviews

Sandy White's third and final game for the Spectrum was a departure from his earlier Softsolid games Ant Attack and Zombie Zombie. Instead, we were treated to the first example of shaded 3D vector graphics on the Spectrum.

And they look very impressive too; you run through a maze of corridors until encountering a "universe" which contain three crystals. One of these will transport you to another universe, one to a nearby section of maze, and the third will reveal a robot part. There are seventeen parts to the robot and you need to collect them in order.

And that's pretty much the game; unlike the earlier Softsolid games it's not like it even really needed to be in 3D. Also, it becomes pretty obvious that your path through the corridors is pre-calculated, as are the animations of the crystals and robot parts.

Ultimately this leads to a rather unsatisfying game that's a bit of a grind to play and without the elements of exploration and experimentation that made the earlier games fun.

That said, its graphical style was to prove highly influential with a number of other games soon adopting shaded vector graphics, such as Starstrike II and Driller.

Eleven years before Core Design coded the classic Tomb Raider for PC, Sandy White (the man behind the awesome 3D game Ant Attack and its sequel Zombie Zombie) had used a similar concept: a character fixed in the centre of the screen, perceiving as he's moving along a 3D map, featuring vector graphics. I have no idea what does it mean, but it made the game look technically impressive. But that's all about this game. A character moves along a monotonous group of mazes, looking for pieces of a robot. As I said before, technically outstanding for a 48K game, but with a poor gameplay.