Previous Next

I can't claim to know exactly how this works, but let's assume for a minute that when a software house ties up a potentially lucrative licensing deal with a coin-op firm, part of the deal has it that they're forced to take some real duffers along with the good stuff. Domark's set up with Atari/Tengen seems to be a perfect illustration of that - for every Klax or Planet Of The Robot Monsters there's Skull And Crossbones or a Hydra. Yes, this is dreadful, easily down to the standards of last month's hopeless pirate hack 'n slash game.

So, Hydra. The arcade machine was a not-particularly-well-received Roadblasters clone, the twist being that it told the story of a water-based DHL-style delivery firm rather than any road-based action, allowing for lots of speedboats, mines and so on. Not a particularly promising start - even converted perfectly it's the sort of game that would seriously struggle to justify anything like a 25 quid price tag - but its simplicity could conceivably make for a half-way fun home conversion. (It would make a change from seeing the Amiga struggling to emulate the latest state-of-the-art dedicated coin-op hardware, that's for sure). I'd say the whole venture was doomed from the start as a full price proposition, but it could still make for a satisfying game at a reasonable price.

But it doesn't. This is a completely tragic attempt at a computer game. Its good points include an innovative and fairly successful attempt at representing moving water on screen in a different sort of way and, erm, that's it. Its bad points take up rather more room - chalk down a total lack of a sense of speed, a total lack of a sense of excitement, some truly pitiful blocky, jerky graphics, gameplay so one-dimensional it can hardly be said to exist at all, and hopeless, unresponsive controls for starters. Sorry, but you're wasting my time, Domark.

Sub-budget quality at a price that's all wrong. In fact, it's no better than Speedboat Assassins, an 18-month old 16-Blitz game that was only £4.99.