Enjoy...I guess. I only play for five minutes because that's as long as I can stand playing the game.
It's time for another simple arcade game for the BBC Micro. Zombie robots are chasing after you, and you must lead them into the swamp ponds to kill them.
The controls are simple. Z moves you left, X moves you right, : moves you up and / moves you down.
You are the green man, while the red faces are the robots. The cyan lily pads are the ponds that you must lead the zombie robots into to kill them, while the green spades are the trees that you can hide behind to keep the zombie robots away at times. It is obvious that the robots should not come into contact with you (and vice versa), but you also cannot walk into the ponds or into the edge of the screen, as both bodies of water will kill you and end your game...something that can happen in seconds.
The game seems simple enough to play, but there are a few glaring problems that cause everything to fall apart. Everything is randomized, including your starting location, and while the game does not start moving until you move in any direction, it can be hard to figure out where you are when you are the same color as the trees. Why couldn't the player character be white or purple or yellow? The game doesn't use any of those colors for anything!
It's also possible to be surrounded by robots and doomed from the start due to everything being placed randomly, too. The controls definitely do not help when that happens, when moving in a certain direction does not always happen to the point that it may take several key strokes just to move one space due to how everything is going. This will cause you to either freeze in place and make it harder or even impossible to get away from a zombie robot, or make it so that you accidentally move into the edge or a pond and kill yourself.
You start out with five zombie robots, but with each new stage you reach, that number goes up by one, and it becomes harder to survive. You only have one life. Each defeated zombie robot only gives you one point, and it is common to lose your only life after only a few stages with a double digit score (especially a low double digit score).
The game has an interesting premise and an interesting idea for some arcade fun, but the sometimes huge delay in the controls make this difficult to have more than anything else. There are not only other arcade experiences on the BBC Micro, but other experiences that also play and hold up better than this one. Skip this one.
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