Producer: J.K. Greye
Memory Required: 16K
Retail Price: £6.95
Language: BASIC and machine code

4Star is a games compendium featuring Invasion, Kamikaze, Minefield and UFO. The four games are each loaded separately one after the other as you choose to play them.

Invasion is of course what it says, complete with eroding shelters. Kamikaze is a mini- 'Scramble' with open landscape and corridors. Minefield has you driving a car around a tree-filled field laying mines. You must cover as much of the field as possible without hitting a tree. UFO is a shieldless space craft which you must fly down the screen through a host of asteroids. Obviously, as you get lower down the screen, it gets harder to anticipate where the asteroids will appear. All four games were copyrighted in 1982.

COMMENTS

Control keys: variable depending on game
Joystick: cursor key sticks in some games
Keyboard play: not very responsive
Use of colour: poor
Graphics: very small, fair
Sound: above average

Invasion is a very fast version of you know what. Although it has all the features the graphics are not smooth and the invaders shower bombs at an unrealistic rate. The program also crashes if you let the invaders reach the ground, and you are then unable to play a second game. Kamikaze is a poor 'Scramble' game with small character block graphics. Minefield is frustration at its best - or worst! UFO is a scrolling ZX81-style game. I think this package should have been called "The Four Most Frustrating Games!"

Four rather old games here, nothing very startling. The Invader is possibly the fastest I have ever seen. All the games have small, very simple graphics and they are all very dated. Even though there are four for the price of one, they still represent very poor value. I would just prefer a good game.

The Invaders game is not very addictive and it is hard to control. Kamikaze has better graphics as far as colours go, but everything is very small, so it's hard to be even vaguely accurate. Minefield is a bit pathetic and personally I think UFO is stupid. All in all, a waste of time and money.