Producer: US Gold
Retail Price: £7.95

Due to a scheduling error, American Railways have decided to run eight express trains through your territory. As an underemployed bandit short of readies, you're certainly not going to miss an opportunity like this. However, others have similar ideas...

This shoot 'em up contains three levels, each of which involves winning a preliminary fight - leaping a line of running coyotes - performing a death-defying train-top walk, fighting off cowboys (who try to either shoot you or brain you with bottles, coal or shovels), and finally mounting a horse and having a go at another train.

To avoid your attackers, you can step and jump forward and back, leap upwards, kneel or lie flat. To protect yourself you can kick and punch your opponents, and when carrying a gun, plug them full of holes.

Points are scored by landing punches and kicks and lobbing hand grenades, and also by shooting ducks, hidden targets and the lady in red (hit her more than once and you're dead buster).

Your enemies do fight back. Take one of their punches and kicks, miss a leap over a coyote, or get hit by a flying object and your strength is diminished (energy levels are shown at the top of the screen). One of your five lives is lost if your strength falls to zero, if you run out of time (a countdown is displayed) or if you sustain a gunshot wound.

COMMENTS

Control keys: Definable; left, right, up, down, fire
Joystick: Kempston, Interface 2
Use of colour: limited
Graphics: large line drawings, but the characters are quite crude
Sound: poor and sparse FX
Skill levels: one
Screens: four scrolling levels

Initially Express Raider reminded me of the wonderful Stop the Express, but it soon became quite boring. The gameplay has no real testability, making fighting too much of a chore to be any fun. The sound is more basic than the arcade version, with no tune and horrible little spot effects. Express Raider does not deserve to be released as a full-priced game.
GARETH

I've never been so bored, Express Raider just goes on and on and... The gameplay is repetitive and the 'feel' is very inaccurate. The idea of choosing your control type before you load the main game is years old and quite unnecessary, as you have to choose them again when it loads anyway! it looks tacky, and is much too expensive.
PAUL

I was I expecting a lot, but I didn't enjoy playing it at all after three or four goes. The graphics are colourful and look quite pretty - until you get up close. Unless you really adored the arcade machine, £7.95 seems far too much to pay, and I should stay well clear of it.
MIKE

US Gold
£8.99

Well dog my cats, root my toot and goldarn it, those pesky varmints from US Gold done gone and brung out the fastest coin-op conversion in the west. Well, maybe not the fastest as it was announced for January but what's a few months between friends when you're talking about 'the ultimate in fast-action shoot 'em ups'?

The Tombstone Express is coming to Gold City, and it's got more silver dollars on board than you've had baked beans, so mild-mannered trainspotting Speccy owners everywhere get a chance to become Express Raider, the greatest train robber in the whole darn prairie. This is some special train robber though, as he did his schooling at the Kung Fu Fighters Academy - does this make him a Marshall artist?

It makes the game a strolling scroll from left to right as first you walk down the main street of town and work over a few of the law-abiding citizens trying to get in your way. Then you can deal with a whole host of coyotes, though they look mighty like black panthers to me. Still, at least they don't have the hero's problems - or is it the villain? Whatever, just call him the Attribute Kid.

Second stage of the game is on the roof of the train, where you leap along, ducking and kicking, with a range of offensive and defensive moves in Exploding Fist style, depending on whether you have the fire button pressed or not - and just for the record this has keyboard, Kempston, Opus and interface options. It also has a Practice Mode giving you 32 lives, and normal and advanced modes too, each with four skill levels.

If you can get along the train to the engine, ducking under the bullets and the flying shovels of grit (hope I typed that right), then you get to ride alongside the next train firing off your gun at anything that moves.

Express Raider's okay for a while, but the Spectrum's capable of much better graphics than this, and much faster action too. If you like a game where you move along going kick-kick-duck-jump-kick-thump then this could be for you, but for me it's been done before, and done better.

Label: US Gold
Author: Homegan
Price: £7.95
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Jack Daniel

Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam - and I'll show you a house with a very dirty carpet... I read the Beano too, y'know - which has only the most tenuous of links with the subject in question, Express Raider, one of the very latest from US Gold.

It's a coin-op conversion from a Data-East game that was mildly successful - a fate that is almost certain to befall the Spectrum version as well - as it's not what even my Mum would call state-of-the-art. Pity, because the design isn't a bad one.

The idea is to combine the kicky-kicky bits of martial arts, the jumpy-jumpy bits of platforms and ladders and throw in the nearest smidgeon (that's a complete lie incidentally, the game contains at least seven smidgens) of shooty-shooty. OK so far? The whole point of the exercise is to rob a train and kill lots of people. Whatever next.

OK, so you've got to rob this train, right. It's the Wild West, right. So you use a Smith and Weston '45, right? Wrong - you are a villain with a heart of gold, and give the kindly banker on the first screen a chance by laying down your arms. You must kick him to death. At this juncture, you are on the left of the screen and the banker is on the right, the setting being the scenic delights of a marshalling yard. You are both black, badly drawn, figures, but the banker has a pot belly, and you are wearing a Stetson.

In typical martial arts-style, the eight positions of the joystick corresponds to eight movements of your man - pressing Fire will either kick or punch, depending on his stance.

Along the top of the screen is a gauge that tells you how well you are doing in the fight. It starts in the middle - to beat your opponent, you must hit him enough to move the red thermometer bit all the way over to the right, while every hit you take, moves it back towards the left... If it reaches the far left, you loose a life.

If you beat him, having grabbed the goodies, the cat is well and truly let out of the bag - well what other reason could there be for having to now jump over a series of black coyotes? That's the first bit, now the action switches to the top of the moving train - you must make your way from the back to the front (where the gold is kept). Each screen is set on the top of a different car, and to complete it you must beat up a different opponent, some of whom have got their heads screwed on straight and have guns (lucky the bullets don't go too fast, eh?) Each of these screens is done against the clock, and failing to win within that times looses you another life.

Having got to the front of the train, the shooting bit starts. You are now riding a horse (animated in Twoframovision (tm)) alongside the moving train. You have acquired yourself a gun and must aim at (shown by on-screen cross-hairs) and kill guys that pop up from behind bits and pieces. At the same time they are trying to knock you off your horse with assorted paraphernalia.

You manoeuvre your horse left right across the screen at the same time as aiming the gun - in fact this bit is quite well done, as the two are linked together in a playable, yet believable fashion.

Again it's done against time... and there are other things to shoot at, like ducks carrying extra money and innocent bystanders - also carrying extra money.

Sounds pretty good, doesn't it? So why does it end up as a far from wonderful product? Well, the graphics must be the major factor. They are badly drawn and not very well animated. Would have been acceptable, say, a year ago - but not full-price nowadays. The playability of both sections is average rather than exceptional one way or the other, and while excellent graphics might have raised the tone of the whole thing, they rather let it down.

It's the first time that I've come across Homegan Software - a Hungarian programming team, messrs Zadonyi et al, who did the conversion.

Express Raider isn't totally hopeless - but maybe they should hire an artist.

MACHINES: C64/Spectrum/Amstrad
SUPPLIER: US Gold
PRICE: £9.99 (C64/Amstrad), £8.99 (Spec), All Discs £14.99

Yup, it's time for some rootin' tootin' cowboy capers arcade style. Express Raider is a mix of martial artistry and shooting skills set in the Wild West.

If you've played the game in the arcades you'll know how sometimes it can be ultra-frustrating - but fun at the same time. The computer version is the same. Parts of the action will make you want to throw your joystick at the screen. Parts of it will have you on the edge of your seat.

The message is that it's worth getting by the irritatingly difficult bits just to play the rest of the game.

The idea behind the game is pretty basic. You have to fight your way onto a train, fight your way along the top of it leaping from carriage to carriage, then it's on to horseback for a rip-roaring ride up the side of another train shooting up the gunmen defending the gold.

All this has to be done within a given time limit - fail and you lose a life. The good news is that you can always restart the game where you left off. None of this back to the beginning nonsense.

You can play the game in any one of three modes. Practice mode gives you an amazing 32 lives - but you only get to play the first two trains. There are eight in all.

In the normal mode you get five lives and get to try all eight trains. If you lose all your lives you get the option of going back to the beginning or hitting the fire button within ten seconds which places you back at the end of the train where you died with your boots on. A useful feature this. In advanced mode you have to go back to the beginning when you've lost all your five lives.

The action begins at the railhead where your cowboy has to battle a few goodies as the train - nice graphics here - pulls out.

If you fail to beat these railway guards - bit like the rush hour this part - you miss the train.

Beat them and you climb aboard and begin your battle to reach the engine before time runs out. The first couple of defenders are easy to get rid of with a few well-aimed kicks and punches. The next guy throws bottles at you which are easy to dodge. Get in close and nail him with more kicks and punches.

The one thing that really lets the game down are the sound effects. Silly little tunes and poor spot effects litter the game. C+VG's Golden Joystick winner Rob Hubbard should have been allowed to get to grips with this game.

Arcade addicts may find this conversion doesn't come up to scratch.

Overall not a bad game - but the sound and frustrating bits of gameplay let it down.