Your Sinclair


Klax

Author: Jon Pillar
Publisher: The Hit Squad
Machine: Spectrum 48K/128K/+2/+3

 
Published in Your Sinclair #80

Klax

"Clicketty-klax, clicketty-klax, that's the sound of the train on the tracks..." Whistling Tim Nabob Nabob Scrimshaw Boing Pheee! Waggling Trousers O'Rourke wrote those words back in 1932, and I like to thank that they still have a certain relevance today. The relevance to which I refer should become startlingly obvious when I mention that the name of the game, so lovingly reviewed in this very block of text, is Klax. There. Now, at last, it all slots together. Curiously enough, 'slotting together' is the main theme behind Klax and it is with this dubious link that we come to the main bit of the review.

Take Tetris, flip it into 3D, add a few more rules and bingo! You've got Klax. You control a paddle - let's called it Eric - and you have to catch falling tiles, slotting them into place on the game board, or else flipping them back up the channel to gain a breathing space. The various tiles slot together by colour, and the minimum needed to clear a line is three in a row. If you're tremendously ambitious you could go for four, or even five for fabulous rewards, but it's tough.

Brilliantly playable, though, and with an addiction factor measured in triple figures with lots of zeroes added on. I love it, and I think you will too. Trust me. Y'see, having to keep all those extra ways of scoring in your head makes this a much more demanding game than the big T. As in Connect 4, you can bung tiles down diagonally, horizontally or vertically. Trickily, you can also make shapes, such as giant X's, or, um, more giant X's. And you can become astoundingly unpopular with your friends by dropping a tile so it causes a chain reaction and clears the board. Stupendous! Basically.

Jon Pillar

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