Previous Next

This is a strangely obscure title for a game which doesn't actually feature anybody called Fernandez, dead or otherwise.

In fact it's the latest collaboration from the team which gave us the ingenious and sadly underrated Zig Zag last year, David Bishop and the wayward Tony Crowther.

It's a foray into the much-explored territory of the vertically-scrolling Commando-type shoot-out. Your mission this time is - supposedly - to locate and destroy the eight military bases of the dictator. But, as is often the case with this kind of total annihilation experience, you tend to lose sight of your objective in all the excitement.

We get a familiar bird's-eye view of the action, looking down on hordes of enemy helmets trundling back and forth across a landscape of roads and rivers, buildings and bunkers. Everything is depicted with clarity and detail, even if the scale is sometimes bizarre, and the overall effect is a bit like a very busy model railway layout.

And it's your job to blow the whole thing to bits. Armed with endless ammo, 20 grenades and five lives, you jump from your truck and wade into the melee, cutting a swathe of mayhem through the ranks of the remarkably dumb enemy soldiers and tanks. Fun as this is, it's more so when you liberate an abandoned jeep - then you can run people over as well as shoot them, and you're relatively safe from hostile bullets.

All this havoc will score a few brownie points, but to start clocking up six digits or more you've got to do some exploring sideways. Closed doors to the left or right of the screen lead to enemy bunkers, and passing through these will take you into the neighbouring landscape - similar scenery, but a different colour.

Doors can be shattered by grenades, or armour-piercing bazooka shells from the jeep, and once inside the bunker you'll find yourself in a maze of sandbags, with bars of gold, ammunition and prisoners-of-war scattered around the shop. Remember Pandora's Into The Eagle's Nest, from early 1987?

The score counter starts blurring now, with 900 points for each released POW, and hitting the Commodore key will call up an instant status screen which displays the amount of gold collected, POWs released and bases destroyed.

Finding the bases is not so easy, and to reach each requires threading an indirect route through various bunkers and landscapes, working your way around the impenetrable barriers which often protect each base. A map of the entire playing area, with walls and bases usefully highlighted, can be accessed by pressing Run/Stop.

By now it's clear that Fernandez borrows from just about every Commando and Gauntlet variation there is, but so what? Its attraction lies in the sheer skill with which it's been assembled, and in the attention to detail that's been lavished on the enterprise.

And I've left the best until last. There's also a two-player mode, where partners can cover each other as they stride into action, and onboard the jeep, one steers while the other lets loose with the machine gun.

As unoriginal as hell, Fernandez Must Die nevertheless shows us two programmers doing what they're best at, and doing it with style. After the delights of Zig Zag maybe Ratt 'N Bish are just marking time, but I for one ain't complaining.