Producer: Sinclair
Memory Required: 48K
Retail Price: £5.95
Language: Machine code
Author: Hudson Soft

Watch out! Emerging from their lairs deep underground the fire-breathing Mammut and their mindless cohorts, the Skorks, are on the rampage. 'Oh' no,' I hear you cry, 'not again!' Never mind - Driller Tanks can prevent them from invading the Summer Palace. The battle takes place in the old tunnel complex beneath the palace. Before the tanks can use their ice-canon and the power of their own weight, they must dear a path through the earth-filled tunnels.

The screen display shows the summer palace to be saved at the top, and below it the complex of earth-filled tunnels. These tunnels are actually five platforms with four or five connecting passages between each level. The driller tank starts each life by drilling its way to the centre before you take over control. The earth is represented by blue colouring, and moving the tank along a passageway results in it turning black. The tank moves faster once a passageway has been cleared.

The mindless Skorks move vertically upwards, filling in any passage you may have cleared. The purple coloured Mammut walk along the passages breathing fire which destroys your tanks. The tanks can fire and freeze a Mammut for a few moments before it unfreezes itself, but if frozen they are vulnerable to your crushing weight and will disintegrate. Scoring is for freezing and crushing Mammuts or freezing Skorks. You are lost if the palace is reached by a Mammut. The game contains eight stages of increasing difficulty.

COMMENTS

Control keys: A or J/D or L left/right, W or M up/down, SHIFT or SPACE fire
Joystick: ZX 2
Keyboard play: responsive, but not massively good positions
Use of colour: reasonable
Graphics: average, although a little on the primitive, blocky side
Sound: average
Skill levels: 1 but progressive difficulty
Screens: 8 stages
Originality: certainly scores here, the game idea is quite novel

This was the worst of Hudson Soft's programs for Sinclair in my opinion. I mean this in the nicest possible way as the game is not really bad, it's just that it did not seem over playable - okay but could have been better. The graphics are fairly good and the smashing of the frozen Mammuts is well done. On the whole I didn't enjoy playing this one, but I would still rate it as above average when compared with games in general.

Unusual game with unusual graphics, one that is quite playable and where timing needs to be quite precise when freezing Mammuts. I like the idea of Mammuts being able to de-ice your cannon, and the way Skorks can hinder your progress. The graphics are large and quite colourful with a fair amount of primitive animation. There are two sets of key layout for left and right-handed players, although in each the 'freeze' key is a bit out of reach. The start of each new screen or life is quite long-winded, something which quickly becomes irritating. Not for the cold-hearted!

I thought Driller Tanks a medium interesting game - quite original in some respects, but somehow not thrilling enough to grab me for more than a few minutes. It has reasonable quality graphics and sound and enough difficulty in play to give appeal - but not for long. Very good demo/instructions.

FEEBLE FOUR FROM SINCLAIR

ERIC AND THE FLOATERS
Memory: 48K
Price: £5.95
Joystick: Interface 2

ZIPPER FLIPPER
Memory: 48K
Price: £5.95
Joystick: Interface 2

DRILLER TANKS
Memory: 48K
Price: £5.95
Joystick: Interface 2

BUBBLE BUSTER
Memory: 48K
Price: £5.95
Joystick: Interface 2

Sinclair Research is continuing its policy of marketing games under licence with four new releases. Zipper Flipper by R.E-D Sunshine is a pinball program with a fruit machine feature included. You have to break down a wall of bricks with the ball to bring the fruit machine into play.

The other three games are all by Hudsonsoft. Driller Tanks, which sounds like a video nasty, is a simple game of underground warfare, as you use your tank to prevent marauding monsters tunneling to the surface.

Bubble Blaster is a slightly more interesting program in which you must burst bubbles with a ray gun before they land on you.

Those three games all suffer from a very simple concept which has not been developed to provide any real variety during the play. The graphics on Bubble Blaster, though they could be better yet, are of higher quality than in the other two programs but are also the least complex when seen on the screen, even though they may be well-programmed.

The fourth in the series, Eric and the Floaters, is clearly superior to the other three. Eric is attempting to explore a lost underground civilisation by planting bombs in a network of tunnels to clear blockages and reveal treasures.

He is pursued by balloon-like Floaters, which also have to be killed with the bombs. The concept is again simple but in this case there are a number of hidden surprises which increase the enjoyment for the player out of all proportion to the extra trouble taken to program the refinements.

To play the games with a joystick you will have to use Interface Two, or one of the programmable interfaces, as Sinclair is clearly not interested in supporting peripherals manufactured by other companies.

MACHINE: Spectrum 48K
CONTROL: Keys, Sinc
FROM: Sinclair, £7.95

Interested in preserving our rich architectural heritage? Outraged by the property developers' mindless destruction of beautiful buildings? Keen on playing around in tunnels? Fed up with questions?

Then Driller Tanks may be the game for you. Not for me, but then I'm a bit of a vandal and I couldn't really care less whether the Summer Palace - a mixture of Taj Mahal and Brighton Pavilion - is undermined by the fire-breathing Mammuts and their 'mindless cohorts', the Skorks.

The palace lies above a network of tunnels, where those Mammuts and Skorks live. The Mammuts are overgrown purple heads with enormous voracious mouths while the Skorks are crab-like things whose only wish in life is to fill in unblocked tunnels.

Which is where you come in. You control the Driller Tank. Your mission - to descend into the tunnels and destroy these evil creatures before they emerge.

Your tank has a whirling pointed nose to clear the tunnels and has an Ice-Cannon to stun the Mammuts before delivering the coup de grace by crushing them.

And that's about it. Down you go. Chug, chug, chug. Dig, dig, dig. Freeze, crush. Of course, it's not quite so easy because your tank moves much too slowly and, if you're using the keyboard, you'll find the controls unresponsive.

Driller Tanks is disappointing because it could easily have been so much better. It needed variety badly. As it is, the graphics are pretty enough but the sound is annoyingly repetitive.