Time to kill the great dictator

Producer: Imageworks
Out of Pocket: £8.99 cass, £12.99 disk
Author: Probe Software

Set in the Central American state of El Diablo, Fernandez Must Die is a Journey into the world of espionage, assassination and Mission Impossible scripts. Your mission Mr Phelps, should you decide to accept it, is to destroy the eight bases that he has set up to secure the area he has captured, find General Fernandez and kill him.

Once embarked on your mission, either alone or with a friend, you find yourself in familiar, Commando-style action, blasting everything that moves with either a machine gun or grenades (hold down fire). Your opponents include soldiers, paratroopers, tanks and even battleships in the rivers you must cross. Bullets will deplete your energy considerably, but cannon shells and land mines kill you instantly. Although you have five lives to lose such weapons, these can go very quickly indeed. Fortunately the planes flying over head are not always hostile, and can drop First Aid kits which can boost your energy. To prevent getting injured in the first place, it's a good idea to jump in the jeep, which makes you faster as well as giving you a more powerful gun. In two-player mode the first person in the jeep drives, while the second aims the cannon.

Being a revolutionary agent need not be an unprofitable activity either. While freeing political prisoners for bonus points you might also pick up some of the gold bars carelessly left lying around in the prisons you can enter. After the war's over these might prove more useful than the medals which are awarded for such heroic deeds as destroying enemy vehicles, being wounded in battle and destroying an enemy base.

Despite looking similar to every other Commando game on the market, many of them now budget, Fernandez Must Die is very playable. Graphics add to the fun with the macho mercenary stomping around the battlefield in a very convincing manner. The backdrops are all very detailed, from the hectic action on the battlefield, to the equally hectic antics within buildings. So, if you love Commando-type games where the hero is a real man, and the story has a happy ending (after half the population and most of the buildings have been decimated), go out and buy Fernandez Must Die.

MARK [90%]

THE ESSENTIALS
Joysticks: Cursor, Kempston, Sinclair
Graphics: mostly monochromatic although well-defined
Sound: a catchy in-game tune which can be turned off if it gets irritating
Options: definable keys. Two player mode

Up zee revolution! At last, a game to rival the classic Commando (Issue 24, 94%). Although vertically scrolling blast-'em-ups are quite common, this one has a lot more to offer than most. Added interest is created by the rooms at the sides of the main landscape and I just love the way the hero can steal an enemy jeep and go zooming around. And boy, he needs all the help he can get as he faces hordes of hostile forces, including the well-drawn tanks and planes. Although the game's mainly monochromatic appearance is rather dull, it hides a wealth of addictive gameplay, accompanied by a catchy in-game tune (which can be turned off). This is no ordinary Commando clone, although fans of that old gem should enjoy it. Furthermore, two players can enjoy the action simultaneously. So get your best mate to help you dethrone that devious dictator - Fernandez must die, hombres!
PHIL [87%]

What's this, Ikari Warriors with a new tune at the start? Well it certainly looks like it but there's more to this than meets the eye. The main objective is to shoot evertything in sight, as in most other such games, but the wider variety of things to shoot in Fernandez makes it more addictive and brings variety to the game. You also have to make decisions on which is the best route and try to avoid the mines that blow your jeep into the air, a very tricky occupation as you can hardly see them. There are planes, trains and (automobiles? - Ed) tanks which, when destroyed, leave behind icons that can be collected and used to your advantage. Things like cannon shells and grenades help immensely when it comes to blowing up the odd train that is hurtling towards you! There are no sound effects in the game but a tune that plays throughout and tends to get slightly annoying when it repeats itself for the umpteenth time. Fernandez Must Die is a great shoot-'em-up with a bit of strategy thrown into make an enjoyable game.
NICK [84%]

Image Works
£7.99 cass/£12.99 disk
Reviewer: David McCandless

Fernandez must die. Why? Is it because he subscribes to the Reader's Digest? Or perhaps because he's a member of the Liberal Democratic... Democratic Social... Socialistic Liberal... that other party?

Well, no actually, it's because he's a cotton-picking dictator. Not content with merely holidaying in Amigo-land or even just buying a cheap stately home up north, Fernandez has flippin' well gone and invaded a whole country! And I thought the Ed was a megalomaniac (I am and you're fired! Ed).

So it's up to you, the humble, patriotic soldier, to trundle along the vertically scrolling landscape, shooting the foreign scum, freeing prisoners and destroying the eight bases in an effort to save your country and the world's chilli industry.

The scrolling graphics (trees, huts, railways, sandbags, bridges) are seen in the typical overhead view and are in that twilight zone between brilliance and um - average I think the word is. Everything has forced shading for a more 'solid' feel - but a lot of it just looked like dirty cardboard cutouts to me.

The scrolling itself, is a little slow when you are walking and firing, but luckily there is the option of clambering into a car when you find one, and the scrolling speed hots up accordingly.

Your enemies are quite varied. First and most frequent are the hordes of antagonistic soldiers intent on having you as a bloody notch on their gun stocks. Then, there is the odd tank or three which gives you hassle if you hang around too much. And don't forget the invincible spitting speed-boat which sprays rockets everywhere, as well as the many buried mines littering the place.

To combat these you have an infinite supply of bullets and a finite but a renewable cache cf explosive shells that provides access to the rooms.

Which brings me nicely (and quite competently I might add) to my next subject, and why not? The rooms. Their catacombed shapes connect the nine fields together. Passing through them in a strategic order allows you to reach the bases. The rooms also house the prisoners, who are found and freed by blasting their cell doors for extra points.

There are a couple of features from the Nice Touches catalogue as well, all adding to the addictiveness and staying power. For a start, you have a map option, useful for finding your approximate position and the position of the bases in a mass of pixels. Then, there's the brilliant oh-no-you're-not-going-back-to-the-start-when-you-lose-all-your-lives effect. Instead when you start again everything is as you left it, including you, beginning from where you ended. Great.

The only niggle I found was the collision detection. It's a bit suspect. Enemies' bullets pass right through you, trucks run you over and you don't die. But clip the uttermost pixel of a mine or tank and hey blamo! you is dead, gringo!

Fernandez, although similar to, is not as singleminded as Commando. You can double back and even utilise a little strategic ganglion of the old grey matter, instead of just blasting, blasting, blasting, swearing, blasting...

Label: Image Works
Author: Probe Software
Price: £8.95
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Chris Jenkins

"Tora tora tora! Scream and die, right-wing anarcho-syndicalist lackeys of the bourgeois counter-revolutionaries!" Or at least, theft's what they would have called the game if they could fit it on the box.

The fact is that Fernandez Must Die is not the searing examination of South American revolutionary politics you might assume, but a relatively straightforward Commando-style scrolling-and-shooting game which fails to live up to its promise.

The original game design was produced by programmer Tony Crowther (remember him?) and David Bishop. It's brilliantly original: "You move around the screen shooting things. Thank you Mr Maxwell, can I have my £2000 now." I could have done that. You could have done that. Anyone with a bit of sense would have come up with an original idea instead.

Anyway, we're left with a top-down view of a large playing area, represented largely in monochrome. Your character, and the odd passing aeroplane, are coloured red, with the result that a charming little square of attribute clash follows you everywhere you go. It would have been smarter to leave the colour off altogether, but apparently the number of moving objects on screen made it impossible to keep track of your character without a dab of colour to help you.

Your task is to rescue prisoners, destroy enemy emplacements and wipe out the eight members of Fernandez' vicious military government (or junta, as Mirrorsoft love to say with a heavy South American accent).

As you progress up the screen - which flips disconcertingly onto a new area every so often - you will be attacked by enemy soldiers, tanks, planes and boats. The soldiers are easy to knock off with a single shot, and the tanks and boats can be destroyed with a grenade if you hold down the fire button. Passing planes drop fast-moving, target-seeking paratroopers, which you'd be well advised to avoid, but they also drop ammunition supplies and red cross parcels, which do no end of good for your weapons level and energy status. You can also jump into jeeps, and drive them merrily up the screen running over soldiers, though eventually you'll have to disembark as you come to unpassable obstacles.

It should be said that the 128K game music is excellent, though the optional sound effects are only average.

To help you in locating the eight command posts, you have a map display. This can be accessed by pressing 1, and shows the posts and connections between levels. The connections are via side doors, and blasting your way through gets you into a fortress. Here you have to shoot fast to keep off the guards, and free prisoners from wall cages using your grenades. Freeing prisoners gives you a points bonus, and by exiting the fortress on the opposite side you can move to another area of the map. There's not much variation to the game, unless you count the excitement of blowing up the odd building to see if there's any ammunition in it. The background graphics are pretty poorly designed, with hills resembling cowpats and land-mines like blancmanges.

Fernandez would be a pretty good budget game, but for a full-price title you expect something more than a re-hashed Commando clone with dull graphics.