Reviews

As Drak, the last of the Obliterators - an elite corps of space warriors -, your task is to penetrate a seemingly invulnerable alien mothership and sabotage it. To do this you are equipped with a fairly ineffective pistol, but along the way you will find heavier weapons that will allow you to punch a hole in the enemy's defenses and score as much points as possible.

In an interesting and original twist, points are not, in fact, just a measure of your progress, but will become very important as soon as you disable all of the vessel's self-defences and weapon mechanisms, allowing Federation fighters to attack. The score will then begin to count down; you must escape from the alien mothership before the score reaches zero, otherwise you will get killed as the ship will be destroyed. You only have one life to accomplish your mission.

Faithfully converted from the 16-bit original, Obliterator is a superb hybrid of exploration, platform and shoot-em-up, where you must care not to waste ammunition and energy running recklessly around the alien craft shooting just at everything. The careful and patient player will be rewarded in the end.

The icon-driven system does not get in the way of the action as much in its precedessor Barbarian; it feels much better integrated in the gameplay of Obliterator than in the previous title. Owners of a 128K Spectrum will also get a nice AY rendition of the atmospheric soundtrack.

This game contains a feature that I never ever got on with, Icon/Menu Driven Control. Where moving your man with keys is not enough, you have to use the icons to do things and that put me off very quickly, never liked it then and don't like it now. And come to think of it this is pretty much a re-skinned Barbarian, and I mean the Melbourne House version and not the Palace Software one with decapitations, even the jumping animation is pretty much the same. The graphics are nice and if it is your kind of game you may well like it, but I never did and never had the patience to.