Previous Next

Your mission, Jim, should you decide to accept it, is this: kill everything which moves and blow apart everything which doesn't.

Yep, there's no pussy-footing with Exolon, no spurious plot and burbling prose to wade through before you get to the action. Hewson drop you straight in it, down there among the alien gun emplacements, minefields, forcefields and blobs, with 125 screens of mayhem ahead of you, and nine meagre lives in which to do it.

All you've got to help you is a handheld blaster, useful for picking off the mobile blobs and missiles, and back-pack grenade launcher for destroying armoured constructs and obstacles. Ammo for both of these is sprinkled throughout the playing area, so you needn't worry too much about running short. Your stingy ration of lives is, on the other hand, crucial. There are no extra lives to be found in the game, and only a bonus life awarded at the completion of each 25-screen level.

Gameplay is more than reminiscent of Commando-In-Space games like Gryzor and Solider Of Light. You move from left to right through each screen, using split-second timing and an itchy trigger-finger. Duck to avoid the bullets, skip over the landmine, lob a grenade at the rocket, jump into the teleport, exit on the upper level, grab some ammo, leap to the next ledge... and so on and so on, for screen after screen.

It's highly unlikely that you'll see all 125 screens, and if you go, that you'll think that they're worth the blood, sweat and blisters. I've actually played through the lot, thanks to an infinite lives cheat, and can assure you that the mixture is pretty much the same throughout - identical backgrounds, identical obstacles, identical aliens and identical action. Even the difficulty level is the same - i.e. diabolical.

The one, slight, variation to this monotonous formula occurs around the tenth screen of each level, where a pink character is located. If used correctly, this transfers your humble foot-soldier into a foot-soldier with knobs on, encased in a hyper-alloy exoskeleton which supposedly renders you immune to most of the stuff you encounter, especially mines and pneumatic hammers.

At this point the action tends to hot up anyway, so that even inside the exoskeleton it gets murderous. If you complete a level with the protection of the exoskeleton you're awarded mucho points, but as this is quite impossible don't even bother considering it.

Despite the colourful landscape and the immediate attraction of totally gratuitous violence, Exolon is a stupidly difficult and dreary addition to shoot-'em-up arcade games. The absence of any variety in the obstacles and enemies to be defeated, and the repetitious nature of the skills which are required, make gameplay suffocatingly tedious.

Its shortcomings are even more obvious if you compare it with, say, Imagine's Army Moves, which featured seven different combat scenarios, and joystick control.

Exolon is one of Hewson's most disappointing games for a long time, and one which even committed thugs and headbangers would do well to avoid.