Producer: Bug-Byte
Retail Price: £2.99

Rubicon's leaders have left their palatial underground environment - and their treasures. One day they will return, but in the meantime you can engage in a little plundering in the halls and passages of Rubicon.

These are patrolled by harmful floor-slitherers and airborne mini-fighters, and deadly darts which kill immediately. To conserve your three lives, you must jump and duck to avoid the approaching mechanical executioners. You can also acquire helpful objects.

Making your way through the corridors and antigrav entries of Rubicon's first level, you discover a control room with an overhead display of multicoloured symbols. Once you've mastered its mysteries, you can reach higher levels of Rubicon.

But don't forget there's a time limit on your scavenging...

COMMENTS

Control keys: Z left, X right, L up, SYMBOL SHIFT down
Joysticks: Kempston, Cursor, Sinclair
Use of colour: vividly colourful
Graphics: big, but unrealistic animation
Sound: Spot FX
Skill levels: one

Rubicon is very colourful, and the graphics are big and smooth-moving though not particularly interesting. But the gameplay is boring and repetitive - it's mostly running around a maze. It takes a while to get used to the controls, and there's no real incentive to learn. There's a distinct lack of things to do in Rubicon - I can't think of any redeeming features other than the colourful graphics.
ROBIN

My first reaction to Rubicon was negative - and it hasn't changed much. The graphics are okay, and the backgrounds are very colourful, though your man in the spacesuit moves like he's walking through treacle. Control is simple, but the game is often slow to react to threats from the missiles and other nasty surprises that Rubicon's rulers have left for you. Rubicon is a barely average search-and-collect-'em-up.
MARK

This must be one of the year's most tedious products. There's absolutely no fun in Rubicon, and its appearance is very unappealing. The graphics do nothing to enhance the awkward control, and the instructions give no useful information. Rubicon - the game to put you to sleep in less than a minute.
PAUL

Bug-Byte
£2.99

At first glance I thought this was going to be just another platform game (not that I've got anything against platform games, give me Jet Set Willy over a flight simulator anyday), but despite some promising-looking screenshots on the cover. Rubicon turned out to be even less enthralling than that.

The instructions are what you'd expect - explore the deserted planet, avoid the robot defences, collect the items of treasure - the usual sort of thing. The controls are - left/right and jump/duck, so I thought I was in for a bit of platform action.

No such luck, though. It turns out that the planet Rubicon is a bit of a boring old hole, just lots of corridors on different levels and not much in the way of obstacles to challenge your wits or your reflexes. There are the defences that I mentioned earlier, but these consist mainly of sprites which attack you at either head or ankle height, and once you're used to the suddenness with which they appear, avoiding them is a fairly routine trick.

Though you can run to the left and right you can only jump up or down on the spot, which means that the action is pretty limited. There are no death-defying leaps from platform to platform (in fact there aren't any platforms either), just running left and right in the corridors and occasionally up and down in lifts. Instead of being an enjoyable part of the game, finding your way around the place becomes a bit repetitious after a while due to the lack of variety in the locations.

There's also a puzzle involving various noughts, crosses, triangles and so on, arranged on a large moving grid. Unfortunately the instructions don't even mention this or give you the slightest idea what it's for or how you solve it. After a few games wasted in trying to figure it out I finally started to get somewhere, but the process was irritating rather than challenging and it's really just sloppy packaging that's responsible for the lack of instructions here.

The game itself is quite well presented, and the graphics, especially the large space-suited figure that you control, are above average for a budget game. It's just a pity that the content of the game is so lacking in variety.