The ultimate anti-piracy game

Producer: US Gold/Access
Daylight Robbery: £9.99 cass, £12.99 disk
Author: An anonymous Welsh person (sources inform us that it was the Design Design team (Forbidden Planet, Dark Star, Hall of the Things etc), but we don't believe a word of it!)

Oo ar jim me lad, the pirates are on the rampage in Echelon. But they aren't yo ho ho and a bottle of rum guys, or even software pirates, but space pirates of the future. ECHELON is an anti-piracy organisation and you're one of its top pilots.

To find the location of the pirate's base you must pilot your C-104 Tomahawk over 36 zones in search of 240 objects. Most of these contain clues, although some are booby-traps, and once teleported aboard can be analysed. Most of these clues are in code which you must decipher. To help you get started nine of the zones are already mapped and included in the packaging.

Naturally the pirates aren't too pleased by your investigation. You can fight their ships with a choice of three weapons. But if you find combat too tough, or boring, then you can alter the enemy's strength from numerous to zero. You still have to return to base for refuelling however.

The view from the cockpit is depicted by wire-frame graphics, which move at an incredibly slow rate - I'm sure I went to sleep, had a great dream about scoring the winning goal in an FA Cup Final and woke up again before the screen updated! Even turning the zone map off only marginally improves the speed. Sound is nonexistent, which is very confusing during combat, and adds to the tedium.

Perhaps the technical drawbacks would've been acceptable if the game was better and it certainly sounds ambitious, with ciphers and so on. But Mercenary it ain't, and the repetition of collecting objects soon induces sleep - if not a coma.

PHIL [17%]

THE ESSENTIALS
Joysticks: Sinclair
Graphics: the jumbled lines that pass for wire-frame graphics move slower than the Art
Department...
Sound: ...but at least there's no Radio One, or noise of any kind
Options: alter the strength of enemy ships

The best thing about this game is undoubtedly the sound - complete silence. Everything else is awful. Combat is probably the worst due to the dead-sloth speed of screen update, sluggish control responses, slow firing weapons and jerky enemies. Finding objects is little easier though, and with 240 to collect this is a game to haunt your worst nightmares.
STUART [15%]

US Gold
£9.99 cass/£12.99 disk
Reviewer: Jonathan Davies

There are three things that are guaranteed to make any reviewer's knees tremble - even one as hunky as myself: a 54-page A5-sized manual, a list of approximately 35 different control keys, and a deadline measured in nanoseconds. And all after I've just swallowed the last mouthful of Balisto.

But what is the relevance of all this, I hear tens of thousands of readers simultaneously cry? Well, the whole lot of them just fell through the letter box, along with a copy of Echelon. It's one of those awesomely complicated simulation games that I'm supposed to like so much, set on another planet just for a change.

Your task, should you choose to accept it, and I strongly suggest that you don't if you value your sanity, is to patrol the solar system's tenth planet, Isis, in your C-104 Tomahawk and try to find the base of a group of pirates that have been giving the Space Federation some hassle. In other words, an explore, collect and shoot game.

There are all sorts of puzzles to be solved in order to locate the base, mainly involving finding little flashing dots on the surface. These are 'clues', which are used to fill in the six maps which show how to get to the base. There is also a code to break which will let you decipher the pirates' transmissions or something.

Before you get stuck into that lot, however, there are hundreds of bits and pieces to get to grips with, including a teleporter for getting the things you collect back to base, an RPV for exploring the planet surface by remote control, a hyperdrive for hopping round the planet and all sorts of other things. Hence the 35 control keys.

In case you hadn't gathered, this is one helluva complicated game, not to be tackled by the faint hearted. Left-right-up-down-fire fans can forget it for a start, as the one thing this game isn't is a shoot 'em up, and any pretensions it may have in that directions are best forgotten.

The problem lies in the graphics, which are horribly sluggish. Wire-frame animation is normally pretty smooth on the Speccy (Starglider being a good benchmark). In Echelon, however, you can get the screen update rate down to under two frames per second if you try hard enough. This means that accurate combat is practically impossible, and is best avoided. The only solution to the problem is to turn off various bits of the display, such as the scrolling map and the reference grid on the ground. This speeds up the graphics no end, but makes it extremely hard to see where you're going.

This aside, though. Echelon has a lot going for it. The map is awesomely huge and is littered with different types of buildings, towers, rivers and bridges. There is even a series of training courses to help improve your skills, and a nice touch is the ability to get the RPV to track your ship as it flies around, so you can watch yourself pile into the ground from any number of different angles. There's no sound, though, which is a shame.

If it wasn't for the lack of graphical elegance, Echelon would be a Megagame for sure. It's still blimmin' good though, and gives you more bytes per pound than most other stuff around at the moment. You'll learn some novel yoga positions trying to handle the controls as well.