Previous Next

Alligata's C64 version of this game was a great success and was about the best of the Commando clones. This C16 version was shown off at the Commodore show in November of last year. But if for some reason you don't know what it's all about, here's a quick rundown.

Armed with an automatic weapon and five grenades, you must charge up the screen shooting the enemy and blowing up their vehicles. There are trees, swamps, trucks, trains, mounds and ditches in your way, but you must charge on regardless undeterred by the havoc all round you until you reach a garrison. From this garrison will come a whole battalion of baddies who must be annihilated. After that, having rescued the captives, you must go in search of the next outpost. And on and on until eventually your three lives are lost.

Okay, details: there are boxes of grenades be picked up and there are eight sectors, each about eight screens long. The game doesn't scroll or flip screen, so when you lose a life you start on the screen you were on. This means that there are about 64 screens of tough action, not bad for 16K.

Next thing - the layouts don't change, so find a way that works and use it every time. The men move randomly, but the trenches they hide in and the mounds they hide behind don't. Also, learn which is the correct path across the rivers and when the trucks and trains come so you're ready with a grenade for them. There's a keyboard or joystick option, with space bar for grenades - this is an improvement over the C64 version which had an awkward method of grenade control.

The game is tediously slow but you get used to it and keep coming back and the sound FX are quite good. Graphics are pretty nice too - the sprites animate fairly well and are multi-coloured with hardly any colour clash and no aura around them. The background objects are pretty colourful as well; the trees look like trees and you actually feel as though you are walking across the river. The game, however, has two main faults; general slowness coupled with the slowness of response of the joystick, which makes it difficult to avoid the bullets.

Another fault is comes the title screen. After every game, Colonel Bogey plays all the way through before you can start a new game...! The tune is very nice, but it does put you off a bit if you have to wait before every game.

But the programmer has tried hard and the game is good - playable, addictive and interesting, but it's not quite as good as Anco's Legionnaire, however.