ST Format


Epic
By Ocean
Atari ST

 
Published in ST Format #37

Epic

Oh say can you see, by the dawn's early light, the smoke from that Rexxon craft, going down as we laughed mani-cally? Da da-da da da daaa, da da-da da da daaaaa, etc and so on. The game: Epic. The reviewer: Ed Ricketts. The theme: American. The punchline: missing.

There are several things in life you really don't want. You don't want to become involved in a clandestine Mafia drugs ring, for instance. You don't want to appear in an advert for The Sun newspaper. And you don't want to get the massed hordes of the Rexxon empire annoyed.

Ah, now there's the problem, you see. You sort of already have. It's like this: your sun is about to go supernova, so the boffins on your world decide to hoik the entire population off to another planet on huge ships. Problem is, this means passing through the Rexxon's territory. Relations between your planet and the Rexxons' haven't been at their best even since they called your planet a pouff when they were down the pub one night. So the presence of several sodding great battle cruisers drifting through the Rexxon Neutral Zone gets their backs up just a little.

Epic

But never fear. Your scientists, busy chaps that they are, have also come up with a little number known as the Epic craft. This is, plainly speaking, the dog's bollocks - apart from a few niggling faults, like the fact that it runs out of fuel every five minutes. With this little beasty - or rather, three of them - your job is to wipe out the entire Rexxon fleet and protect your own peeps from complete and utter destruction. Hey, it's a snip.

Sex Death Horror

Epic is a game of monumental destruction, eight missions of it, all depicted in gut-wrenching 3D. The missions usually have two objectives each, involving as much sabotage of the Rexxon Empire as possible. For example, the second objective of the first mission has you destroying a deep space tracking station on the planet Amragan Nine to enable your fleet to go past. Interspersed with these sneaky missions are the most direct confrontations in space - that is, the hits where you and the Rexxons shoot seven shades of saffron out of each other. There's a password given for each successfully completed mission.

Whether you happen to be in space or on the planet, the speed of the graphics is never less than zippy. There are some scorching effects too - if you blow a car off the monorail, it doesn't just explode, it flies off the road and lies on the side, smouldering. In between the missions are animated interludes featuring a mix of detailed bitmapped backdrops and 3D objects - very effective.

But Without The Sex

Epic

Your craft is fitted with the sort of weapons that would make the Iraqis jealous, but on certain missions only some of them are available. The most basic is yer laser rifle which is pretty pathetic; then you've got yer proton pulse cannon, yer ion beam, photon torpedoes, the neutron Epical laser - which can destroy a city in one blast - and, of course, the Cobalt Salted Antimatter Doomsday Device, which is used for wiping out troublesome planets - not the sort of thing you take on every mission. The Rexxons don't have all this nightmare technological machinery, but they do outnumber you by four to one. Gulp, in a very real sense.

As mentioned, the Epic has a tendency to run out of fuel very quickly - partly because its defence shields consume such a lot of the stuff. Luckily there are fuel pods and ships hanging around the planets and in space, which can be located and picked up using a standard fuelscoop. The pods are extremely small, though, and you need to spend quite a bit of time just searching for the damn things. You can always cheat and press Enter, which gives you all the weapons and refuels you. Oddly enough this cheat is listed in the manual! And while we're on the oddness, the box boasts that "Epic is not compatible with Mega 4 machines." Er, but yes it is, actually.

Or Even The Horror

But it ain't hard. Once you're used to the game, you can play through the entire set of eight missions in a little over three hours. For once, though, this doesn't matter all that much. Unlike Another World, which you'd only want to complete more than once if someone had a gun to your head, the sheer satisfaction of blowing aliens out of the sky and off the planet is reason enough to load up the game once again. Besides, you can always set yourself extra challenges, like only using one weapon to complete a particular scenario.

Epic

The between-mission sequences, lavish and well-done as they are, quickly become annoying, and, though you can skip them, it would be good to have an option to turn them off altogether. Epic isn't perhaps the awesome megagame it was shaping up to be, but it does come pretty close. For speed and detail of graphics, only Thunderhawk can touch it at the moment. Master it now and you'll be ready for the Falcon version. Now there's something worth getting excited about.

Epic,_Or_Bloody_Minded?">

Epic, Or Bloody Minded?

So why the hell did Epic take such a terrifically long time to be releassed then, eh? Well, it's all the fault of that Amoeba games machine. The game was developed on the ST and most of it was finished last December, hence our preview in the January issue. But then the conversion to the Amoeba began, and things went horribly wrong. There were tons of snags and pitfalls which put back the release date again and again, because both formats had to be released simultaneously. Eventually though, the Amoeba version was sorted out and the game is now available. Mind you the game's been in development for a year and a half anyway.

Verdict

Epic is the best blaster the ST has seen for a long time. It's been so long since anyone has bothered to spend the time and effort to put together a shoot-'em-up with quality graphics and sound - and not just some piddling, horizontally-scrolling thing. The satisfaction of wasting wave after wave of scum-sucking alien trash comes flooding back as soon as you see the Rexxon horde. If you don't feel your bloodlust rising when you're confronted with the 1,000-odd enemy ships of the Mother of Wars, see a doctor.

The samples could have been a little better - particularly some of the firing noises - but the music is absolutely superb. Almost the entire Mars movement from The Planet Suite, sampled and spliced together pretty well, accompanies the intro and between mission screens - whack up the volume and get that blood stirring. It's the music that Star Wars nicked and mixed up a bit, and it suits the game perfectly.

In Brief

  1. Epic's only competitor is Thunderhawk in terms of style, speed and 3D graphics...
  2. ...Although DID's own Robocop 3 comes close, but it's not quite as frenetic as this.
  3. Samples aren't as good as Robocop 3's, though the sampled music is exceptional.

Ed Ricketts

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