Infogrames
£24.95
TNT is the latest release from the French company
Infogrames and is possibly their most impressive yet. Those of you
who have played 'Commando' or 'Ikari Warriors' in the arcades or on
other micros will probably feel at home with 'TNT' as it's a sort of
cross between the two.
My copy was a pre-release version so I didn't get any
documentation, and therefore I'm not sure what the ultimate aim of
the game is, however your primary task would appear to be to shoot,
knife or grenade anybody who moves! Upon loading the game you are
greeted by a reasonable picture of a soldier with the game logo.
Accompanying this picture is a very good piece of music, in fact it
is some of the best I've heard so far on the ST. The French
composer, Charles Callet would appear to be perfectly capable of
equalling anything which either Rob Hubbard or David Whittaker have
produced and these are two of Britain's foremost computer musicians!
You move onto the first game screen, a very pretty
swamp, drawn in some nice pastel shades. The swamp water appears to
move slightly around the reeds, and then a large helicopter flies in
from the bottom of the screen, dropping a lone soldier and then
flying off. This lone soldier happens to be you! Selecting a machine
gun using F you move on into the jungle, and suddenly enemy soldiers
start running towards you from all sides shooting and lobbing
grenades. You mow down a few with your trusty machine gun and then
finish off a small group with a well aimed grenade. Continuing on
you come across many more soldiers until eventually you reach the
end of the swamp. The helicopter then picks you up and takes you to
level two. The next level loads in revealing a jungle in the middle
of the night along with another very good piece of music. In all
there are four levels, each graphically more impressive than the
previous one, and each level having it's own exceptional piece of
music before you begin.
In the final version you will have five weapons, a
machine gun, a rifle, grenades, a knife, and a flame thrower. You
can only carry a limited amount of ammunition and grenades, so you
must use your weapons carefully. The flame thrower can be used only
once per level, however it was not implemented on my copy. I
understand that on the production version it will act as a form of
'smart bomb', frying all of the enemy soldiers that are on the
screen at that particular time.
The sprites in TNT are more 'in proportion' than
those in other games of this type. Each soldier can be seen carrying
his weapon and wearing camouflage gear, with a back pack and beret.
My only complaint about the game is that the sprites sometimes
flicker a bit.
The scrolling is superb, because whereas most
scrolling games at the moment only scroll a relatively small
proportion of the screen, TNT manages to scroll the full screen
extremely smoothly. When I see scrolling of this quality it
sometimes makes me wonder what other software companies must be
doing!
TNT,
looks, plays and sounds superb and I expect that the finished
version with the simultaneous two player option should be even
better. By the time you read this it will probably be out, so save
your pennies!
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