A&B Computing


Elixir
By Superior/Acornsoft
Acorn Electron

 
Published in A&B Computing 5.02

Oh dear, a real disappointment from Superior this time and, having been expecting this one for quite a time, I was hoping for a real classic.

Written by Richard Williams, John Llewellyn and Chris Hyde (committees are often not the best solution) the game involves a series of puzzles set over forty screens of 'hilarious chemical capers'. Briefly, you are a scientist shrunk to the size of a bottle of pills and have to negotiate shelves of chemical apparatus to regain the growth formula. So far, so tedious.

The action and graphics are flat, with a neat redeeming feature of pixel-hatching to create a very colourful game. As you negotiate the shelves you must collect forty vitamin pills as well as a series of objects for puzzle-solving. A fair bit of time is spent working out which pills are god and which are not, but a bit of quick mapping soon sorts that out.

Careful planning allows you to reach seemingly inaccessible places by climbing bottles of different heights, often far away from where you want to end up. It's not that the game is difficult, more that it doesn't really inspire.

Pity about that. There's evidence here of some crafty programmers at work and the shame is that they've created a game with all the right ingredients except the most important - does it draw you back to play again and again? I've had to, of course, in order to write the review but somehow I don't see myself returning to it again.

Dave Reeder

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