Producer: English Software
Retail Price: £7.95
Author: Gareth Briggs

Ripping through space in your fighter craft, you pass over three different panoramas - Moonscape. Cityscape and Greekscape - which float through the silent darkness on platforms of land. task: to rid each territory of the entities which infest it. (There's a time limit, of course.)

You can control your fighter's direction and attitude, negotiating the lunar domes, towers, radar devices, Greek statues and skyscrapers that project from each landscape's surface. Contact with any of these wipes out one of your four lives.

The fighter is equipped with limitless missiles, and three smart bombs which can take out any alien in the vicinity. For each alien destroyed, points are awarded, with an extra life earned for every 5,000 points.

Read-outs give the number of aliens remaining in a sector, the number left in the current attacking wave, and their type. All aliens are lethal when touched - but prompt evasive action can be taken by flipping the craft onto its back and reversing direction.

Different life forms have different flight paths and flying configurations, which makes their destruction more difficult. Two flashing directional arrows on the instrument console show the location of aliens.

Your craft has a limited supply of fuel; it can fill up by shooting approaching fuel cubes in the space zones of each planetscape, or by landing on fuel-pod arrows in the Cityscape sector. Sound effects warn you when the craft needs a top-up.

According to the inlay, Leviathan was inspired by the ZZ Top video Rough Boy, which is set in a spaceship.

COMMENTS

Control keys: A left, S right, F up, D down, G fire; or cursor keys
Joysticks: Kempston, Sinclair
Use of colour: monochromatic
Graphics: good, ranging from detailed landscapes to simple designs - but sometimes confusingly complex
Sound: informative beeps on 48K, full music and effects on 128
Skill levels: one
Screens: three diagonally-scrolling play areas

Leviathan isn't amazingly exciting, and the loading sysetem nearly always goes wrong! The background graphics are well-detailed, but when your ship flies over them you can't see where it's gone - a serious problem.
NICK

As shoot-'em-ups go, this is a dead loss. The screen is very cluttered, so you can't really tell where your craft is (it's the same colour as everything else) or what's going on. The control method is unwieldy, and a lot of problems occur because the accelerate/decelerate controls are on the same keys as the up/down controls. I can't recommend Leviathan. It offers no challenge, because of its bad implementation - though it could have been the best Zaxxon lookalike yet.
BEN

The graphics unquestionably the drawing point of Leviathan. The scrolling is very fast, and the landscapes are detailed, with good perspective. The trouble is, they suffer from the same problem as Slap Fight (page 20 this Issue) - you usually can't see where or what the baddies are, because of the amount of detail. And as far as I can see Leviathan has nothing to do with ZZ Top. But it's the best Zaxxon-type game on the Spectrum; the competition is very dated. If you can overcome the playability problems, there's an addictive game here.
PAUL

English Software
£7.95

There are few things sadder than almost making it past all the pitfalls of a great obstacle course only to come a cropper against the final brick wall... and I'm not just talking about playing games.

English Software is a newcomer to the Spectrum, having scored considerable successes with some things called the Commodore (Spit) and the Atari (What that?) They've approached our own particular little eight bit bundle with all the respect it deserves (well, rather more than that, thank de Lawd) but somewhere, something went wrong and they fell at the last fence.

Leviathan is a nice idea - a shoot 'em up out of Uridium paired with Zaxxon. That means plenty of fast flying and blasting as you swoop across a landscape which is seen in diagonally scrolling 3D, changing height and dodging surface features while your radar warns you of approaching aliens.

A lot of work's gone into getting this one right. There are nice sound effects and music on the 48K machine, and when you move into 128 mode the pee-owws of the potshots ricochet handsomely. You even have a choice of three landscapes to glide over, including the relatively innocent Moonscape, the fairly easy Cityscape and the downright dangerous Greekscape, complete with monumental statues.

By now you should be slavering to play this but get a hold on those gastric juices because somewhere along the line playability got sacrificed. The main problem lies in the graphics, which are extremely attractively shaded with a selection of stipples, but which also make your craft difficult to see when you're flying at speed. Time after time I lost sight of my ship or failed to spot a wave of aliens, all because they blended into the background.

Steering could be a little gentler too, with more of a sideways glide than a rather sharp turn. And the Zaxxon-style diagonal play area is a little short, requiring extremely fast manoeuvring if you suddenly find yourself heading into a bunch of nasties. Add to this a temperamental fast load system and you may find yourself looking elsewhere.

All of which is sad, because this could have been so good, and perhaps next time English will drive us all into a patriotic fervour. But for now, file under brave failures.

Label: English Software
Price: £7.95
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Tamara Howard

Quite what the connection between the bearded boys of ZZ Top and the new game from English Software is, I don't know.

But a connection there obviously is because the blurb says that Leviathan is based on the video for Rough Boy. Why?

The other thing that confuses me is the title. Where's this big ship that's referred to in English Software's ad for the game. I couldn't find it. Literally. Quite frankly, your craft is so small, it's in danger of disappearing up its own existence.

About the only thing Leviathan-like about the game is its overall size - it comes in three Loads. The main game and two alternative landscapes.

Still, no matter. There are some other big things in this game. One of them is the booming 128K soundtrack, which is quite definitely not ZZ Top, for which, I suppose, we can all be profoundly grateful. There is also a big, Oh-My-God-What's-Going-on-now factor.

Leviathan is a Zaxxon-style diagonal scrolling game. Now, they're not my cup of tea, I must admit, but I can live with it. What I find a little more difficult to live with is the puniness of my spacecraft, and the enormity of everything else.

As the screen scrolls huge chunks of what appear to be a wrecked planet come hurtling towards you. They can't be that wrecked though, because most of them appear to have some sort of installation on the surface, radars, rocket launchers, and large glass domes, the purpose of which is surely merely to be flown into.

Pretty soon I discovered it's simple to avoid these features. Simply use the joystick of your choice to raise your ship above the height of the highest tower, and fly right over them. Simple, safe and boring. You can't hit anything, but then again, they can't hit you. So where's the game?

It's just a case of flying about and dodging around them. Which should be easy, providing you have good reflexes.

Apart from the problem, that is, that because your ship is so small, and in the same colour as the background, you just can't see it.

Flying blind through a missile base is not easy. You're more than likely to fly straight up a glass dome. Or a piece of falling masonry. Yes, you can actually get to choose what kills you. By using the multi-load landscape facility, you are able to produce two further areas in which to die. These consist of a landscape, and a Greekscape (lots of aliens in skirts drinking retsina?) it's particularly bizarre, featuring large statues with spaceships whizzing in and out.

As well as a variety of inanimate objects to avoid, there's the odd spaceship to contend with too. Alerted by warning radar-like beeps, you find yourself suddenly in the midst of a swirling mass of enemy craft. There are ten assorted aliens to choose from, not that you get much choice, it has to be said. Some are on the round side, and some come in a fetching pyramid shape. All of them are, like you own ship, hard to spot, and again, it's all too easy to end up flying straight into someone else.

I'm not quite sure what to make of Leviathan. Why do people spend a lot of time concocting a brilliant soundtrack, complete with warning bleeps, echoing bullets and sinister, thumpety-thump music, and leave all aspects of gameplay to a "close you eyes and pray you're lucky" sort of situation? Why can't I find it in my heart to like Leviathan?

It's not en easy game to get worked up about. There's very little sense of challenge and games which appear to rely on luck rather than skill to win through don't give me much entertainment.

I'm sadly disappointed that Leviathan has little more to offer than prettily decorated chunks of rock. And as a Zaxxon clone its a pretty poor show.