Sinclair User


Mystery Of The Nile

Categories: Review: Software
Author: Tamara Howard
Publisher: Firebird
Machine: Spectrum 48K

 
Published in Sinclair User #69

Mystery Of The Nile

I don't want any of you lot to say that Mystery of the Nile looks anything at all like the film of similar name starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, because it doesn't.

That said, I can get on with the review. Mystery of the Nile is an arcade adventure, set in Egypt (vota surprise) and concerns the search by hero Nevada Smith (!), his assistant Janet Dwight (!!), for the sacred Jewel of Luxor, which has been whipped by Abu-Sahl and his thugs.

It's quite nice to look at, but there's nothing special about the graphics and though there are forty screens in all, they flip rather than scroll.

Mystery Of The Nile

Each location has a full complement of angry assailants and different adversaries need different members of your home team to kill them. Because - and here's the novelty element folks (you knew there was one didn't you - and it certainly wasn't the plot) - get to play all your three characters at the same time! Anyway, as you progress, you pick up Indiana, I mean Nevada Jones. Smith, Nevada Smith. And then you have to choose between the three of them as to who's best to bump off whom.

Now the only problem with this brilliant idea, is that you have to wait for everyone to catch up with you. So if you change from Janet to Al-thingy, you have to wait for everybody to turn around and get behind you, and while they're doing this, the chances of catching a bullet are pretty good.

That's a bit of a downer really. But apart from that, the lacklustre graphics and blippy pseudo-Arabic music, there's something completely. 'Ooh - just-one-more-go' about it.

Mystery Of The Nile

OK, so the graphics are a tad trundley, and there's a pretty imaginative blip, blip, squeak, squeak, splodge as everyone trots round the town, but the film's the thing, I mean, the game, what film, nobody mentioned a film did they?

All together now, when the going gets tough, the tough get going...

Overall Summary

Appears to steal from that film, but a tasty little game all the same. No great shakes concept wise.

Tamara Howard

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