Producer: Reaktor
Retail Price: £8.99
Author: Tony Cooper

The Gobots' friends, have been captured and taken to the planet of Mobeius by minions of the wicked Dr Braxis. Knowing that the robotic supergroup are sure to make a rescue attempt, Braxis sits back upon his evil bottom and waits. In due course the Gobots arrive and set about their task of mercy.

You control Leader-1, a courageous mechanoid with all-round manoeuvrability who travels through a horizontally scrolling corridor of floor and ceiling, rippled by hills. In these tunnel confines helicopters, fighter craft, and vicious robots materialise or emerge from their buried silos, and touching any of them, or hitting the ground, ends one of his three lives.

To protect himself, Leader-1 carries laser weaponry, effective against almost all his enemies, but additionally he can excavate rocks from floor or ceiling and hurl them at opponents.

White globular enemy bases are lodged on both the floor and ceiling of Mobeius. These can be destroyed by picking up scooter clones and dropping them onto the bases. When all of the bases on a level have been shattered, the next level can be reached, with a bonus of scooters given.

Leader-1's capabilities are further tested by his human friends who fall from airborne copters. They can be saved, but only if our hero is fast and brave enough.

For your extra delectation, a second cassette contains a Challenge of the Gobots music track by Robert Schroeder.

COMMENTS

Control keys: definable
Joysticks: Kempston, Sinclair, Cursor
Use of colour: varied and attractive but resultant attribute clashes
Graphics: very small display area and characters
Sound: good music and reasonable spot FX
Skill levels: one
Screens: scrolling

The gameplay is totally dire but somehow it's addictive. I'm sure, though, that nobody's going to be hooked on a game that's been as badly implemented as this for very long. The controls are unwieldy - fiddling with the front end only makes them more so - it's due to this that things get very infuriating. The graphics are small but cluttered on screen, and they lack detail. Sound is Gobots only redeeming feature, although even that falls apart on the title screen - nice effects though. All in all I'd stay well away from this one.
BEN

I never did like the Gobots cartoon so l didn't expect much of this game, and I got exactly that, not much! Worst is the presentation - there's no loading screen at the start, just the irritating way Reaktor games load. The game is almost impossible to play, move up or down just the tiniest bit and you crash into some big white blob going by. The mountainous landscape in the background moves very well and the sound isn't all that bad, but I would expect much more playability in a game.
NICK

Nowadays all tie-ins are approached with the greatest trepidation and looking at Gobots it seems quite rightly so - there's very little to actually do. The game is unplayable for the most part, and all you really seem to be paying your money for are extras like the included soundtrack (a good laugh) and a stupid little storybook (only suitable for the under-sevens). Don't be fooled by all the implied content. Gobots is not a surprise, but more of a disappointment as another tie-in fails to come off.
PAUL

Reaktor
£8.99

The scene is the far distant mining planet of Moebius, where the Evil Gog is ripping off the minerals and preparing to mobilise his turtle-waxed demons of death, his mighty killer Robots, in a mission to turn the Earth into a greasy stain on the garage floor of the Galaxy. He'll succeed unless you, at the helm of the last Gobot, Leader 1, can blow 'em up before they can get into first gear.

A shade better than your average licence deal, Gobots is a horizontal scrolling shoot 'em in the Defender mould, and of its sort it's exceedingly fast and zappy. You fly Leader 1 over the surface of the planet, shooting the BadBots and picking up scooters to bomb their bases with... Scooters? Yep, that's right, but not the sort you stand on and push with your foot. No, these are Clones of Scooter the Gobot that, for no good reason, have been scattered randomly around the planet surface. You have no ready source of ammo to lob at the oil-dribbling hordes, so you must use what comes to hand.

Flying is a bit of a game in itself, as one of the unique features of Moebius is that as well as having the usual ground under your feet, you have a 50% bonus layer of it over your head! So in order to stay airborne you have to counteract the gravitational pull from above and below to stay in control of your plane. Add to that the fact that Leader 1 seems to have only two speeds, Really Fast and Completely Stopped, and you've got enough to contend with before you've even started trying to shoot things!

I must say I found Gobots very tough going. The speed of the thing is quite frightening, and you really do have to put some time just learning how to fly and walk.

Minor niggles included the colouring of the game, which for the most part was green, light blue, yellow and white. (Hooargh!) Not the most easy-on-the-eyes combo I've ever seen, and while it's just a bit hard to make out on our colour set, it'd be virtually invisible on a black and white telly! The other thing was the speed. If you like a real challenge then you'll love the speed of the game, real skin of the teeth stuff. But if you like a fighting chance then Gobots can be just one death after another, which can be a little bit demoralising.

Still, all this complaining aside, Gobots is a skillful player's shoot 'em up and combined with the tape of music and computerised short story which are part of the package, is really good value.

Label: Ariolasoft
Author: Tony Crowther and Ross Goodley
Price: £8.95
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Jim Douglas

Well I don't know about you but I haven't got a clue as to what all these Gobot things are about.

After spending ages and ages ploughing through the apparently endless 'book' (you load it into the Spectrum and flip from page to page - more economical than a novella) and considerably more time than was comfortable listening to the audio tape Theme to the Challenge. I was none the wiser.

Apparently some of your mates have been captured by an evil fiend by the name of Gog. To rescue them you must destroy everything on the surface of the planet, or something.

No matter, the game itself is rather good. It's all horizontally-scrolly with er, 'bold' graphics (ie blocky), a fair bit of colour and a lot of killing.

It's been written by Tony Crowther and Ross Goodley who've obviously been heavily influenced by Jeff Minter.

The screen is a bit difficult to explain movement-wise. As you can see, there's a ceiling and a floor, with a mountain range or something in between. Well, the mountains jiggle up and down a bit and it's possible to fly in either direction or - and this is where the Gobottian element comes to the fore - land on either the ceiling or the floor and trundle along.

While you are in the air you look like a sort of dart, and when you land, you mutate into a standing-up robot - standing the right way up on the floor or upside down on the ceiling.

Flying around is decidedly hairy at first, and you go very fast indeed. As you fly gravity pulls you to the top or bottom, toward whichever surface you are nearer at the time. As a result, most of your time will be spent waiting for a new man to appear after smashing headlong into something dangerous. Either that or one of the many enemy robots will knock you out.

Good news then that an editing section has been added enabling you to tailor certain aspects of the game (speed, gravity, etc) in order to make things a bit easier.

After I'd tweaked down the gravity a bit I started to do a little better. Along both surfaces are large white egg-like things which are apparently bases. Providing you have picked up a couple of the little robots which can be seen scurrying along the surface - Scooters - you can press the bomb button and drop one of the little suckers on top of the installation, blowing it to bits in a most gratifying manner.

Destroy the correct number of bases, you'll move on to the next level.

Yes I know it's pretty disappointing the next level is almost invariably virtually identical to the previous one save the fact that there are a few more varieties of aliens. But it's still great fun.

Gobots is actually a very playable arcade game that is anything but run-of-the-mill.