Personal Computer News


Traxx

Author: Roger Howarth
Publisher: Quicksilva
Machine: Spectrum 48K

 
Published in Personal Computer News #045

Square Dance

It seems that most computer games these gays go out of their way to give you a glorious role to play as well as the game, whether you're Captain Sprog of the UK Boobyprise wading your way through a galaxy, or a white knight rescuing damsels.

Traxx has a really rather refreshing attitude, here's a game, you know what to do, now do it. There's nothing written on the cassette inlay card at all that tries to sell you this game, only a pretty picture. Even the on-screen instructions are only three lines long. These simply inform you that what you control is supposed to represent a spaceship, what you're trying to avoid are bugs, and in colouring in a square, you are actually capturing it. Fine.

Objectives

This is a game for one or two players that involves you quite literally zapping around a grid trying to 'capture' squares. This is done by outlining them with your spaceship. Things aren't so easy because there can be as many as nine bugs chasing you, and physical contact with them is, predictably, fatal.

Traxx

You can use either a joystick (if it's an AGF one) or the keyboard to control your spaceship. Both these methods will take some getting used to as your spaceship's acceleration is rapid.

In Play

It must take a lot of skill to be able to function effectively with nine bugs haring after you at full throttle. I found life extremely difficult with only two slow ones. This is the only real progression that the game makes. There are no new, exciting, colourful screens to work up to, same old screen, same old bugs, just once you've filled in the entire grid, it clears and you get an extra bug to annoy or destroy you.

This is the source of my only criticism. The game only ever gets harder, nothing else changes. From this point of view it's very dated. This is a shame because everything else about it is good; the graphics are very nice, smooth (albeit super-fast) movement across the screen, the odd sound effect - all this is great, but why no actual game?!

Verdict

I already have a large collection of similar games that sit on a shelf; they never get played.

Roger Howarth

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