Producer: Mastertronic
Retail Price: £1.99
Author: Shaun Southern

If anyone has ever doubted your shoot 'em up capabilities, now is the time to give Proof Of Destruction. POD has deliberately avoided any feeble scenario in favour of pure, unadulterated blasting.

In this case, the battleground is an interconnecting grid which spans an optional background of scrolling rainbow colours, and your POD for PODs, for there is a two player option) can be directed anywhere along this matrix.

Aliens generally approach from the top of the screen and are swiftly despatched by the POD's blasters. The resultant explosion also destroys a piece of the grid and while the section heals within a few seconds, the gap is impassable and effectively restricts movement of both aliens and the POD.

Each level is timed, the aim being simply to stay alive until the timer runs out. An extra life is awarded every time a level is completed and thus the game only ends when all lives are lost during a level.

COMMENTS

Joysticks: Cursor, Kempston, Sinclair
Graphics: the garish backgrounds make POD a strain on the eyes
Sound: below average, lacking originality
Options: definable keys, one or two players

Yawn, there aren't many games that I almost fall asleep in the middle of, but POD is one of the exceptions; within a few games it had bored me to tears. All it seems to consist of is a few psychedelic, eye wrenching screens with tons of aliens pouring out bullets at your craft. This goes on screen after screen; blam, blam, blam. Graphically POD is okay, but in the playability stakes, it's more or less a non-starter.
MARK

Yuk! What garish colours and terrible sound. And as for graphics - where are they? Each screen is just a grid with loads of little dots, lines and blobs, representing aliens, their bullets and your gunshots. Just to make it even more confusing your ship looks like the aliens'! The simplistic and difficult nature of the gameplay soon proves repetitive and ultimately boring.
NICK

Take a basic shoot 'em up, strip it of irrelevant scenario, take away the sound, throw in a flashy background and you're left with POD. The grid is an innovative idea, controls are smooth and the aliens fly in suitably devious formations. Unfortunately there is no atmosphere to complement the gameplay: sound effects are extremely limited and the rainbow scrolling merely obscures the action. Remove this and you're left with an uninspiring grid plus some very repetitive gameplay. One to avoid.
KATI

Mastertronic
£1.99
Reviewer: Jonathan Davies

"POD has no pretentious storyline" is the sort of sentence that's guaranteed to fill the heart of an overworked reviewer with dread every time. There goes my witty, topical intro paragraph. Still, saves on typewriter ribbons I s'pose.

In the unlikely event that you're interested, POD stands for "Proof Of Destruction." and it's billed as the most addictive shoot 'em up ever. I just hope the Trades Descriptions Act doesn't apply to computer games, or Mastertronic will be in it up to the shoulders.

POD uses the prehistoric grid format, in which the alien scum comes hammering down the screen at you, ready to be picked off by your gun turret. If you can survive their onslaught until the timer runs down, you have the dubious pleasure of going on to the next level.

The graphics, if a bit UDG-esque, move nice 'n'smoothly, but sadly there's nothing in the way of colour. Except, that is, for the migrane-inducing background, which can luckily be switched off. What's more, there's no sound, and what use is a shoot-'em-up without a few ear-drum mangling FX!?

This isn't really up to scratch, even for a budget game, so as far as I'm concerned it can just POD Off!

Label: Mastertronic
Author: Icon Design
Price: £1.99
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Tony Dillon

Pod is a fast moving, colourful, difficult, exciting shoot 'em up. There, I've finished my review. Well, what more can I say? That's what the blurb says. I can't harp on about alien rulers wanting to rule this, that or the other, or your endless quest of the orb of whatever. Dum de dum. I'm getting paid for this you know. Oh, all right, I'll tell you a bit more. Pod is, in a word, psychedelic, (very) is all the Minter hallmarks but it isn't. The background is the long scrolling mass of colours. You fly a little pod around a grid, and nasties quickly fly down from the top very smoothly. You move very quickly and the rain of fire is astounding. Looks nothing much but well worth digging out for a couple of hours entertaining alien blasting.