Previous Next

This Amstrad game by Ego-Trip is actually the prequel to Jewel Warehouse, and features the same heroine, Amy, on a quest for crystals in a bunch of caverns. Unlike Jewel Warehouse though, it's awful.

First to the instructions. As seems depressingly normal in the Amstrad world, it doesn't come with any. I'm tired of labouring this point in reviews by now so let's just give it its first black mark and move swifty on.

Next, it's joystick only which, quite obviously, means you can't play it without one. Now practically everyone plays Amstrad games via the WinApe emulator on their PC these days and, considering you can emulate a joystick through your PC's keyboard, this might not be too limiting - were not mapping those keys fiddly and time-consuming. Add this on to not knowing how to play and you may wonder why you're bothering - before you've even moved Amy across a single screen!

Amy Concave is a platform game and it employs an energy bar in the shape of a heart. This is depleted in quarters if you collide with spikes or a patrolling nasty. Regrettably, the collision detection is ridiculous, particularly in relation to stationary obstacles. Completely clearing them still eats up big chunks of your heart... and if you jump into a door for which you haven't collected a key, instead of bouncing off it as you might expect, you are instantly killed! There's also a very noticeable, and quite disconcerting, "recalculation" of your lives and energy bar whenever you change room.

Dark red as a background colour is a very odd choice and, to conclude, there's no sound at all apart from a scale of notes whenever you jump and a buzz when you lose some energy.

Now that is a long list of complaints. Indeed, I racked my brains in the hope of finding some reason - any reason - to advise anyone to play it. Alas, I came up with none. As the game was written with an arcade adventuring tool, about the best crumb of comfort I can offer Ego-Trip is to say it might be terrible due to the limitations of this tool rather than the programming skills of its author.

Amy does react well to controls and the game itself does have a nice Opener and Game Over sequence. And, of course, I have seen a lot worse.

It's a shame that the Amstrad is being somewhat neglected at the moment but you'd have to be pretty desperate for a new game for it to even consider giving this a go.