Talent
£14.95
It had to happen eventually didn't it? A version of 'Scramble' was
bound to turn up at some time. Deathstrike is Talent software's
first attempt at an arcade style game on the ST, and let's hope that
any others they plan on doing are better than this!
The game loads with a fairly mediocre picture and some extremely
boring music, which is on a par with the music on early Paradox/
Eidersoft games such as Warzone (i.e. awful). You are then given the
opportunity to turn off the music (which I would imagine you will
find an essential thing to do, as it drove me crackers after a
while!) or to turn off the sound effects, or both. You then press
the joystick button to begin the game.
The scrolling is one point about Deathstrike which I like, it is
smooth, and the area of screen which scrolls is quite large, unlike
many games which I could mention. The graphics of the mountains are
flat and uninteresting being in only one or two colours which gives
the screen a very dull look. The various things on the ground such
as fuel dumps and missiles are fairly boring and colourless, and are
not that well drawn. The sprites are smoothly animated, and your
space ship is reasonably detailed, being a grey craft with a large
rocket engine at the rear.
Deathstrike has no new ideas at all, it is merely a straight
conversion of Scramble, involving just bombing things on the ground,
shooting missiles and destroying fuel installations when fuel is
required. So overall, all I can say is if you like Scramble then you
might like this, but personally I think that the game is uninspired
and boring. It is yet another game which does not stretch the ST at
all. The programmers have obviously not tried to take advantage of
the ST's superior graphics. Unless you feel you desperately need a
Scramble clone (which I would imagine is highly unlikely) I am
afraid that this is yet another game I cannot recommend.
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