Previous Next

It's good to see that someone's found the answer to overcrowding in prisons. The people of Zan don't mess around when it comes to dishing out heavy doses of penal servitude. Not only do they lock up villains and throw away the key, they jettison them into space and forget them. Cruel perhaps, but think about the savings to the taxpayer.

So these steel prison hulks orbited the heavens for hundreds of years, by which time you'd think the lifers on board would have well and truly served their sentence. You'd be wrong of course, having failed to take account of 'advanced stogenic regeneration'. The prisoners have got a nasty dose of radiation from the burnt-out engines and have mutated into hideous metal-eating monsters.

These guys aren't too fussy about their diet and think nothing of feasting on the hull of the prison ship itself - chomping huge great holes in the outer walls of the hull, which before long is looking like a Granny Smith with a bad case of maggot infestation. The big bonus to the prisoners' metallic diet is that they can eat out any time they like. Prison food never tasted so good and the mutoids are escaping in their droves, every one of them with a full stomach.

You act as a sort of supersonic screw, blasting the inmates as they make their escape bid and filling up the holes in the hull to keep the others in. Of course, you need more than a trowel and a slap of plaster to accomplish this task, you are equipped with five diamond-tough Supertronics - versatile craft built for screws in space.

Supertronics can operate in several modes. Ordinarily Killar mode is the most effective for blasting the prisoners to bits, but you need to keep an eye on your energy which drains away rapidly in this mode. Energy can be restored in Solar mode, but unfortunately you can't shoot anything because you're far too busy soaking up the sun.

The job of patching up the holes is done in Rovar mode. You actually land on the surface near a hole, drive over it and fill it with the fire button. An easy task were it not for the hundreds of jailbirds trying to make a break for it. Contact with these seriously depletes the energy meter so you have to make a very quick job of patching up the hull. Apart from anything else, if you're not fast the holes appear more quickly than you patch them up.

Your five Supertronics are not the use-one-at-a-time craft you get in most games. You can switch from one supertronic to another at any time, and in circumstances it is necessary to use two Supertronics together, for example to change the polarity switches which govern movement direction on the hull surface. Supertronics can also help each other out by swapping energy. If one Supertronic is running low and you don't have time to bask in Solar mode you can switch energy from a fully charged supertronic to a flat one.

If you are careless enough to let all your Supertronics run out of energy it's game over time. Much more likely is all the prisoners will munch their way to freedom before you can fill in all the holes. If you do manage it, you can have a go at the more difficult levels all the way up to level five, which must be like trying to drink water from a tea strainer without getting your shoes wet. The graphics aren't spectacular, but they're good enough to hold up a middling to good game. On the sound front cassette users get the added bonus, if that's the right word, of a free cassette featuring Destiny Records' new signing 'The Company She Keeps'. I didn't get a copy so I can't say much, but whatever it's like, it has to be better than the soundtrack for the game.