Personal Computer News


Embassy Assault

Author: David Janda
Publisher: Sinclair Research
Machine: Spectrum 16K

 
Published in Personal Computer News #011

Raging Robotics

Corridors Of Power

You are a top secret agent who must enter a foreign embassy, find the code room, steal the classified ciphers and escape. If that sounds boringly familiar the difference in Embassy Assault is that you get a 3D view of the building as you travel along its corridors.

Nine levels of difficulty are offered, although the game is not very complex. I played it on a 48K Spectrum but it will run on 16K.

Objectives

There is a four-storey embassy to explore with several rooms on each floor. You simply have to find the cipher room as quickly as possible and then get out. There are no guards or hidden dangers and all you need is a good sense of direction.

Embassy Assault

Failing this, there are maps on the walls at various points which will show you a plan of the floor you are on, but you incur a time penalty for looking at them.

First Impressions

The cassette sleeve is clearly labelled and decorated with a picture of the code room door with lurking shadow. Instructions are printed on the inside and are simple and concise. The game loaded without trouble and offers the use of joysticks or keyboard.

In Play

The game kicks off by asking you to wait while it generates the embassy and for the absent-minded it displays a compass, the floor number, and the time elapsed.

The display is quite dazzling with green/blue walls, yellow floor and light blue ceiling and clearly a lot of thought has gone into this.

You use the four cursor keys to move left, right, forward and half turn, each step taking you about five metres in the desired direction.

But the response to your fevered button-pushing is very sluggish with the program taking about five to seven seconds to redraw the display after every move.

Once you have found these precious ciphers you simply waltz in and take them - no guards, no booby traps. Nothing.

Verdict

Embassy Assault is certainly different to the usual type of maze game but it soon lost its appeal because of the lack of danger. You could hardly call it exciting.

You could drum up some interest by competing with friends for the fastest time, but you could do this with most games.

This may be ICL's idea of an entertaining game, but I'm afraid it isn't mine.

David Janda

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