Producer: Melbourne House
Retail Price: £7.95
Author: Paul Kidd and Geoff Evans

Doc the Destroyer is the first of an advanced race of superbeings with programmable levels of strength, endurance, intelligence, luck and charisma. Each of these attributes is assigned a value, from a total of 60 available points. And just as well too, for the bewildered Doc now finds himself in a scarcely habitable Earth of the far future.

Remnants of the human race live in and around a city surrounded by an energy dome. Society has divided into a band of Priests controlling the Tower of Knowledge, the populace who live in the rest of the city, and mutants cast from its boundaries.

Doc is accused of spying for the hated priests and becomes the object of a manhunt. He escapes, but with little money and only a wooden club for protection.

Location descriptions scroll down the right-hand side of the screen - arcade adventure style - with a menu window displaying the available options.

Doc's characteristics determine his ease of progress - a high level of luck enables him to slip past guards unnoticed, whilst the higher the degree of intelligence he possesses, the greater his ability to influence the minds of other men. Our hero is forced into combat with bounty hunters, horrendous hounds, and psychopathic slugs.

The endurance levels of Doc and his enemy are depicted as shrinking bars below the combat zone, diminishing with each sustained hit. A character dies when his endurance drops to zero.

COMMENTS

Control keys: Q up, Z down, I left, P right, SPACE fire
Joystick: Kempston, Interface 2
Use of colour: two colour playing area, but colourful illustration left of text window
Graphics: basic and simply animated
Sound: little more than white noise
Skill levels: one
Screens: two

I was eager to play this new release from MELBOURNE HOUSE as I'm a very keen role-player. But I was really disappointed, this arcade-adventure places its emphasis on killing horrible little nasties and not much thought has been put into adventuring. Doc's facial expressions are nicely animated, as are most of the graphics - but the gameplay is a bit tedious.
GARETH.

Doc the Destroyer is an interesting concept, but the idea has not been developed to its full potential. The graphics vary from a superb Doc face that reacts to your decisions down to a terrible fighting sequence. The best screen is without a doubt the characteristics section - it's a game within itself. Doc The Destroyer doesn't contain enough to be fun to play. Doc is a good character, but the game doesn't suit him.
PAUL

The concept appears to be quite attractive, but its implementation leaves a lot to be desired. Why MELBOURNE HOUSE should use the unattractive Sinclair character set for a game which relies so heavily on text leaves me mystified. The idea of having Doc's face to convey the characters emotional responses to your actions is a good one, and that remains the single best aspect.
MIKE

Melbourne House
£7.95

Melbourne House has combined a dungeons and dragons type character (with strength, endurance, intelligence, luck and charisma) with arcade action and a text adventure. Not only that, but the way the game plays depends on the way you've set up your character, so you'll need to play it several times to develop the best combination.

At the start you have to choose Doc's attributes (oo- er!) it you make Doc's strength Supersonic he'll tall over at the first sign of battle 'cos he'll have no endurance, so you'll need balance and forethought. Once you've done that you're off into the game. At each location you're presented with a set of choices to make. If you decide a bit of blood and gore is needed, go into the arcade combat section. where you battle against one of Doc's enemies. If you win, you can carry on, if you lose, it's back to the beginning. The battle movements are well thought out, and you need a fair amount of practice before you beat the baddies. Once you've bashed the life out of them, the choices pop up again and this time you may choose to go into the text adventure bit.

Here you get descriptions of the rooms as you wander through them, and there's also a picture of Doc in glorious cross-eyed technicolour. As the game progresses Doc's expression changes, showing just how well you're doing. At the bottom of the screen is the games menu window - this displays the options you have to choose from to make Doc do something else. Depending on what you choose, Doc will either carry on with his adventuring or he'll go back to the arcade battle sequence, so you've got to choose wisely. You also have the option to save your Doc to tape if you're successful and want to carry on at a later date, and this also means that you can use your Doc in future games of the Doc The Destroyer series, since Melbourne House has promised us more to come.

Doc The Destroyer's an interesting mix of the two types of gameplay - both the hack-and-slash and the think-it-through. All good clean fun, I reckon

Label: Melbourne House
Author: Beam Software
Price: £7.95
Joystick: various
Memory: 48K/128K
Reviewer: Graham Taylor

Doc the Destroyer, lone superhero, is kicked out of the Domed City. This is because the Domed City is doomed but the inhabitants resent the dogooding Doc telling them so.

Looks like Doc is doomed too. Is Domed doomed? Is Doc doomed, dumb and sure to be deemed dead? It's up to you.

Doc is a rather inventive mixture of kicky-facey game, animated graphic adventure and role-playing extravaganza. Not just violence but intelligence and wit and courage required too. Kicking with confidence in fact.

The game is controlled totally via joystick - from the selection of actions via a menu option to thumping various baddies over the head and there are essentially two fairly distinct elements to the gameplay.

First the decision-making game which works roughly like the likes of Adrian Mole. A scene is described and you have around half a dozen options - directions you might go in. actions you might take, eg Explore. It's usually possible to make some sort of intelligent guess about what the best choice to make. Here's a handy tip - peculiar old men in rooms full of books are almost always goodies and usually bestow mystic objects of great worth, and it's therefore a good idea not to kill them.

At various times (about one every three choices on the average it seemed to me) what you decide to do - even if it was the 'right' choice in some sense - will cause you to immediately become involved in a battle. This is the part two - the bit that works like Exploding Fist albeit with reduced options. Basically you can move left and right and hit high, low or swing with a club. The Sprites are quite well done, quite large and quite detailed with pleasing animation - similar to Fighting Warrior, a previous Melbourne House game. Less impressive is the background on which the fighting takes place - there isn't any. Not a sausage. Just blank empty space. The baddies change however. Although there is a standard thug you also get to fight Yorkshire terriers and slugs (at least that's what they look like). Don't be lulled into a false sense of security - I've never made it past the Yorkshire terriers yet.

Doc the Destroyer is nevertheless a pretty impressive game. Partly because the scenario is quite varied and partly because the number of alternatives presented even quite early on in the game is large - there are a lot of decisions to be made. The fighting part works fairly well although some of the time I felt I'd just been dumped into conflict for no reason, ie, it was just bad luck rather than poor judgment.

Doc the Destroyer is neither devastating nor a dodo. But it is a bit of a change and in its own terms it works well.

Also, the programmers have taken some efforts to hide the essentially visually dull nature of the text parts by presenting them as scrolling in a speech bubble belonging to a giant warrior face.

Level 9 please note for future Adrian Mole or Archer type programs: this is the way to do it.

MACHINES: Spectrum/C64
SUPPLIER: Melbourne House
PRICE: £7.95 (Spec), £9.95 (C64)
VERSION TESTED: Spectrum/C64

Nyaa! What's up Doc? Ah, I see. You've been roped in to play the starring role in this latest Australian epic and you don't get any lines as good as Paul Hogan! Still, let's crack a tube of the golden nectar and have a look at what the blurb calls a "role-playing science-fantasy text and graphic arcade adventure combat game with a mappable playing area, multiple choice and massive sprites." Got that? Good.

Doc puts together bits from other sorts of games, mixes them together with a liberal dose of interesting graphics and splurges out a fairly different game.

If you've played multiple choice role-playing games on computer then you'll be familiar with the multiple choice type of scenario. For example: do you a) Fancy an ice-cream b) Attack the 20ft high marshmallow-man with your pickaxe or c) hide under the sofa. That sort of thing.

Doc has that. But it also has a live Fist-style arcade combat section when and if you get into fighting situations. The graphics for this part of the game are pretty impressive. BIG characters fighting it out. Spectrum? Well as you'd expect they are a bit limited but still good to look at. But, hey, what about the plot? Coming right up readers!

Doc is a time traveller. With a name like that what else could you be? One day he finds himself dazed confused and without any clothes lying on a pile of rubble outside an alien looking city.

It seems that the city-dwellers are about to flood the area around their home wiping out the local tribe known as the Rubble Runners. Both the rubble and city are enclosed under an energy dome.

Doc's job is to save the Rubble Runners, find his time machine and generally avoid being wiped out by the various nasties that take a dislike to him.

A typical "move" in the game would go something like this. The screen display shows Doc's smiling face on the left with a "speech-bubble" on the right which contains adventure type text descriptions of locations, conversations and the multiple choice options for your next move. These can range from simple n,s,e,w, directions to whether you want to fight someone or eat something. Your decisions affect the outcome of the whole game.

A brave try at a "different" type of game. Good fun to play for a while but lastability could be a bit suspect. Once you've cracked the game I doubt if you'll want to do it again.