Previous Next

Ahh, this is more like it. No pretence of a plot - just shoot everything that moves. Victory Road is of the vertical scrolling variety, and quite good it is too. The action is fast, the movement smooth - both uncommon for CRC machines.

The storyline is minimal. Just try to get as far as you can up the long road ahead. You are armed with a gun and hand grenades to start with, but you can pick up flamethrowers, extra armour and better grenades if you're lucky.

Once a boomerang-like weapon made a brief appearance, but the shock of it lost me a life. These bonus features are lost if you lose one of your six lives, which can lead to some tricky situations - trapped down an alley with four vampires calls for a flamethrower at the very least.

Occasionally you may be transported to the den of some rather larger nasty thing, who looks and sounds like Cohn with a hangover.

This stage is a real test of logic and strategy. Blast it to bits as fast as you can.

Where Victory Road becomes really special is with its simultaneous two-player option. This adds another dimension to the game as you and a friend team up to get as far into the game as possible. Of course, teaming up means that you also race to the bonus features, and if perchance a hand-grenade should accidentally hit your partner just as she is about to get a flame-thrower. Well, that's life, isn't it? The controls are slightly odd in so far as they support the Cheetah rotational joystick. I didn't get a chance to play with one of these. It would certainly add to the game. Without one, you must toggle between shooting in the direction you are running, or shooting constantly in one direction,

Minor criticisms are that you need a joystick for two people to play at once - although my mouse worked quite well - and that bullets are sometimes hard to see on a green screen.

The opening tune is pleasant, the graphics reasonable - even if the vampire does look like a flasher - and the gameplay is superb.