Previous Next

Conqueror is a conversion of David Braben's 3D tank combat game which caused quite a stir among Archimedes owners a year or two back. It's made up of three separate games, each with ten levels of difficulty.

The arcade game pits your lone tank against waves of increasingly tougher enemy tanks. Each tank destroyed earns you points based on its strength, and as your score increases your tank automatically upgrades itself.

In Attrition, you get a force of two light, two medium and one heavy tank (all of which are modelled on real WWII tanks) with which you have to destroy an ever-increasing enemy force. While you take control of one of the four, you can send the others trundling off to their own destinations, doing battle with any tanks they run into.

The third game concentrates much more on strategy. At the start of each round you buy tanks to make up your force, then set out to take possession of an area of land and defend it for a minute. To help out, you can forfeit points to call up a spotter plane (to pinpoint the positions of enemy tanks) or a remote artillery barrage (to blow 'em up).

Conqueror certainly looks great, and has obviously had a lot of thought put into its design and implementation, but it does have a couple of flaws.

The main niggle is that the tank graphic is so dinky that it's often unclear exactly where your gun is pointing. Consequently, the fast-moving arcade game (in which rapid and accurate aiming is essential) is so difficult that it's hardly worth playing.

In the strategy games, the enemy forces are more spread out, so the action is more subdued and much easier to get to grips with. Anyone whose tastes are slightly more thinking than blasting will enjoy Conqueror.

Others should attempt a recce mission before committing the defense budget.

The Amiga version was ported across from the ST version, so there aren't any differences, apart from a marginally faster frame update.