Producer: Software Projects
Memory Required: 48K
Retail Price: £5.95
Language: Machine code
Author: Simon Munnery

Despite the rather humorous artwork on the cassette inlay, Ometron is actually a deadly serious 3D cockpit type game in which ten waves of attackers try to land on the grid which you are defending. This is, of course, stuck out on a lonely uninhabited outpost of the empire. You are armed to the teeth with cannons in a revolving turret. Nothing must get past...

The screen view shows in the top third the blue of deep space, filled with stars; the middle third contains the perspective lines of the grid on which you sit, and the lower third shows the edge of your turret, score lines and a graphic representation of which direction you are looking in.

The attackers, which include such diverse and terrifying space craft like Muon attack fighters, Tie Fighters, Coathangers, Sugar Cubes and Laserwing 235s (Oh no - not the 235s), all come at you from every direction of the eliptical plane. The Muons are on first, arrow shaped things. All the craft are in hollow 3D. Should one of them hit you, you lose a life. They are as likely to hit you from behind or the side, so it pays to have eyes in the back of your head - fortunately there is a flip key...

COMMENTS

C/V = rotate left/right, B = flip, SPACE or CAPS F. fire
Joystick: none
Keyboard play: responsive
Use of colour: reasonable
Graphics: very good hollow 3D and smooth
Sound: continuous
Skill levels: 1
Lives: 3
Screens: 10 waves of attackers

The graphics work very smoothly, although they are not particularly colourful. What I liked was that this 3D cockpit type game moves very quickly. The enemy are frighteningly single-minded about wiping you off the face of the grid. But I also thought it wasn't all that addictive - not that it's too easy, it isn't at all - but somehow there didn't seem to be a sense of involvement in the situation. Getting the hang of flipping to shoot an alien that has just whipped past and will probably get you next time takes some practice, but once that's done, I felt it didn't go anywhere.

Ometron is an excellent 3D game with very good graphics and I found it extremely addictive. The flip button is essential so that you can be ready for attackers from behind (craft disappearing away into space reappear behind you and vice versa). It also has quite reasonable and continuous sound and a useful demo mode. Very good.

Pretty exciting to play - it takes a lot of concentration with some timing skill when you are hard pressed. The one thing I thought the game lacked was a proper radar scanner. All too often I lost a life and wasn't even sure why, probably hit from the side.

Ometron - 48K Spectrum, £5.95 - leaves its player stranded on an uninhabited outpost of an empire to protect the landing pad there from hostile forces. The player is situated in the middle of the landing grid in a revolving turret aiming cannons.

It is yet another of those arcade-type games where the aim is to blast a number of three-dimensional space ships into oblivion and is very boring. From Software Projects, Bear Brand Complex, Allerton Road, Woolton, Liverpool.