Previous Next

There are hideous creatures with antennae and more than a natural number of legs needing to be dealt with. The invsion must be stopped, and there's only one person suitable for the dirty job. It's not the ordinary alien attack from Planet X that we're talking about here. It's insects - and they've taken over the whole house.

Your day's work starts in a quiet and secluded cul-de-sac. Seven houses are infested by larger-than-life insects, animated household garbage and worse. You are a spooky disembodied hand hovering around the screen and must stomp, squash and splatter the creatures as they come toward you.

The variety of pests is staggering - over-large flies, toy tanks and killer tomatoes, to name but a few. If they fly you have to catch them in your hand to kill them. If they don't, you can kill them by swatting them with a quick downward swipe.

As your kill ratio goes up, the floor tile directly below you changes colour. Fill up an entire strip with your colour and you're onto the next screen. Each house also has a bonus level where you can gain extra points with no harm to yourself.

In the first couple of houses, you must shoot rats as they scurry around the shelves of the scullery. There are plenty of others too - wasps hover enticingly near with their stingers out and bombs threaten to blow your fingers off. You've got more than dashpan hands to worry about here: allow them to be hit too often and it's curtains.

The interior design of the houses is well done, but they're just backgrounds - pretty pictures against which you engage the enemy. They don't actually affect the gameplay at all. Movement of the disembodied hand, your playing sprite, is fluid and lifelike - but the creatures are so cute it seems a shame to kill them. Their tiny forms fall lifeless to the floor and lie there, stuck to the carpet by their own oozing guts. (Sob!)

Plenty of squelchy and splatty sounds accompany your death-dealing blows. There's also an up-tempo tune which adds a sense of urgency to your thankless task.

Exterminator must be one of the most original arcade games! It's easy enough to get to grips with the controls straightaway, but the gameplay is challenging enough to keep you coming back for more. The two player mode - where two of you play left and right hands - adds another dimension. It has all the classic arcade elements which make a game stand out from the crowd. While you may not play it for hours on end, you'll feel the urge to come back often enough.