Autocras

Copyright : Diabolic | Reviewed by : Malc Jennings

Oh dear, another game that should never have been created, or should we say "re-created" on your home computer. Despite the rather promising introduction screen (previewed on the left) the game reduces to nothing more than a computerised version of the fun park attraction "bumper cars" as you?ll see in our review.

Graphics

Well you would be forgiven for thinking that the game would be an early version of the controversial classic we know today as Carmageddon which was released by Sci in the 90?s. Sadly once the game finishes loading you?re reduced to a rather poor version of the fun park classic "bumper cars" with pretty basic looking graphics in only a few colours, slow with poor collision detection. The menu effects (text sliding into place in a bloody like way) are nice to look at for the first few items but soon become boring and highly irritating, we could certainly have done without this feature. Autocras is not quite the game it promises to be and with bugs scattered about the place it didn?t impress us very much.

Sound

Sound of course is basic with just the sound of a spring or thud when you collide with the other cars or hit the barriers around the square ring, nothing much to test your speakers or the excellent sound hardware present in the Amstrad CPC. Then again the game was created by a rather unknown foreign software developer so we?ll just be thankful there is something to listen to.

Gameplay

Gameplay is boring, all you do is drive around the square and hit the other cars until one of you wins, there?s no blood, no weapons and not a single pedestrian to run over (as the title screen suggests). Controls are buggy and you?ll find it increasingly hard to get your bumper car to do anything you want it to, it suffers from a temendous amount of slow down in various stages (so bad that if it was a PC game you?ld be hitting CTRL-ALT-DEL and quitting back to your OS).
It doesn?t offer very much for many gamers and it has to be one of the most boring racing style games we?ve ever seen on the CPC. Okay it?s not the worst title ever to hit the CPC, we know there are a lot worse games than this but if you can?t do what the tin suggests why say you can?