Producer: Atlantis
Retail Price: £1.99
Author: Glynn Carey

The setting is a damaged anti-radiation bunker, crowded with survivors of a future nuclear war. Unfortunately these survivors are now trapped by fallen debris and rubble. Aided by three specialist rescue droids, your mission is to get them out, tunnelling through rockfalls by shifting boulders Boulderdashstyle.

Droid Number One is used for tunnelling, Number Two automatically teleports survivors to safety, and Number Three can be used to clear obstructions. Control can be changed from one droid to another at by pressing the corresponding number key.

Owing to the high radiation levels, the once harmless MK1 bunker maintenance droids have become vicious killers. They have to be avoided at all costs, as contact results in a massive energy loss for your droids - he mutant droids must be crushed or trapped if your mission is to continue.

There could be up to a thousand survivors trapped in the seven level bunker and time is at a premium. All the survivors on a level have to be rescued before you can continue, and the status area shows how many humans have been rescued and how many remain to be found on the current level.

COMMENTS

Control keys: Q up, A down, O left, P right, 1, 2, or 3 to access droids, 4 and 5 to quit current game, ENTER to pause game
Joystick: n/a
Use of colour: plentiful
Graphics: undetailed with jerky movement
Sound: spot effects
Skill levels: seven
Screens: large scrolling play area

Remember Thunderbirds? Then imagine it mixed with a fair splash of Boulderdash and you've got Survivors. Graphically this is about average: the backgrounds are drab and the characters lack detail. The sound is also a bit on the lame.
BEN

I just can't believe how good this game is! At first I thought it was just an average copy of Boulderdash with a magnify routine - but Survivors is more in the style of Thunderbirds - requiring a lot of thought and planning. The lack of a joystick option makes little difference, as the keyboard control is very responsive. The graphics are a decent size, and the comparatively small play area continually springs surprises on you. It's excellent value for money. I just hope that ATLANTIS can keep it up.
PAUL

What's this? is it a playable game? Yes! There is a very predominant sense of Rockford's Riot and Boulderdash in this, with all the jerky scrolling, poor characters, falling rocks and tunnelling, and oh, I could go on and on... It has also inherited the playability of RR, and therefore has a lot of potential at this price level. This is the type of game that could keep you going for a long time. In itself, Survivors isn't a bad game, but the graphics and the 'return to the start' bit knocks it down a bit.
MIKE

Atlantis
£1.99

I'm a survivor so when the Ed gave me Atlantis' new offering I didn't complain, well not much anyway. I spent a couple of minutes translating the instructions from what looked like a follow-up to Star Wars into the fairly simplistic occurences on the screen, but Survivors had promise...

First you're confronted with a screen made up of a maze of walls, blocks of earth and purple boulders. In amongst that lot there are the survivors, deep in hibernation (sounds like the YS office so far). With three robots in your control - a teleporter, an octopus-like earth digger and a strong arm to move stray boulders - the idea is to clear a pathway and scoop up all the survivors with the teleporter.

And there's no need to heave a sigh of relief 'cos there's the usual sprinkling of nasties (in this case green nasties) that zap about draining power from your roving robots. Watch you don't dig earth with your brain disengaged either or you'll end up trapping one of your robots under a pile of purple boulders and if that happens you may as well give up.

At best Survivors could be described as a graphical adventure with a bit of logic thrown in. At worst, it's predictable and frustrating - there's only one way to complete some of the rooms and like many platform games starting again holds no new challenges. Not only that but the time limit of over an hour hardly keeps you on the edge of your seat.

Still, for all the criticism, it is a time consumer - whittling away a couple of hours poses no problem at all. Definitely one of the survivors.

MACHINE: Spectrum
SUPPLIER: Atlantis
PRICE: £1.99

1986 is going to be remembered for two things. Firstly is the enormous amount of arcade conversions coming out for home computers. Secondly, and the most important, the amount of budget software that is being released.

Budget titles account for over half of the sales of software. This is yet another of them but it's one of the worst.

Your mission is to rescue almost a thousand survivors from a hibernation dome, damaged in the recent nuclear war. To help you on your way you are provided with three different droids to control.

To hinder you on the mission are MK1 Guardian Droids which cause a serious loss of power on contact. If one droid eats the wrong earth, boulders can fall and prevent further progress.

Sound is needed in this game - even only spot effects.

Movement is jerky and the graphics are very simple.

Spectrum
Atlantis
Boulder
£1.99

Boulderdash was an all-time classic home computer game. Nothing previously had managed to capture the addictiveness or the sheer annoyance of being so close to completion of the Xth screen but not achieving it.

Survivors, from Atlantis Software, shares certain ideas with Boulderdash and another arcade classic. Dig Dug. In Survivors, it is your task to rescue almost 1,000 survivors of a nuclear war, hence the name of the game. To do so you must guide three droids through the seven levels and then teleport the survivors out.

Graphically, the game is good, although by no means special. It combines a relatively simple idea with a slightly more complicated plot to produce a fun, although basic game.

It is, in the truest sense of the phrase, cheap and cheerful.