Previous Next

It's now time to put your skill and trigger finger into action with this Rocket Raid type game. The object is to pilot your fighter through a series of caverns to finally arrive at and destroy the Neutron bomb.

En route the player has to avoid the tortured landscape, concealed missiles and being tracked by the radar bases, the armament of the fighter consists of a forward-firing gun and a bomb launcher. Using either a joystick or the keyboard, the player controls the vertical and horizontal movements of the fighter and by using the fire button/key causes a bullet to be fired as well as a bomb to be dropped.

A useful tactic is to blow up everything in sight as the radar bases if left undestroyed cause the paratroopers and surface-to-air missiles to be more accurate. The series of caverns is divided into our stages, each of which must be successfully negotiated before the next stage can be entered. At the end of the fourth stage, the player is given a chance to destroy the neutron bomb. If this is accomplished then the four stages are repeated but at a higher level.

A feature which I found to be very useful, was the ability to enter a training mode which unlimited lives, through the initial menu, to allow the player to familiarize themselves with the layout of the standard caverns before their actual sortie. As with the actual game, the successful negotiation of a particular stage causes the player to progress to the next higher stage with again unlimited lives.

A couple of points to bear in mind, while playing the game, are that hitting the space bar causes the launch of a single missile as well as the dropping of a bomb, while keeping the space bar pressed causes a single bomb to be dropped but allows missiles to be fired continuously.

Now for the feature that I feel gives the game its addictive playability and that is the ability to customise Penetrator to your requirements. So, you can make the game either as easy or as dificult as you wish. The player having entered the edit mode is free to alter the landscape as well as the number and position of the rocket and radar bases.

The player can not only restructure the landscape and the battlements but also the various stages in which the changes are made. When in the edit mode, a specific set of keys can cause the landscape to scroll in either direction until the player arrives at the area to be changed.

Once having set up the stages are required, the player can then proceed to save his/her vesion of the changes for later use. So, in theory, the player could set up a library of caverns ranging from a doddle to a sleepless night.