Barrier Reef (The Great)

Copyright : The Power House | Reviewed by : Malc Jennings

For some strange reason, and we hope it?s not searching for those sharks in Deep Blue Sea or anything, you have gotten into a mess and must collect the many scattered objects around the bottom of the Barrier Reef. Be careful though as there are plenty of nasty fish, traps and a poison like coral floor that will zap your life upon the slightest touch.

As you might have guessed, yet again we have no idea what the story is but you get the idea.

Graphics

Barrier Reef does have some pretty nice looking graphics on offer from the very start of the game, a nice number of colours have been used both on our character and the surrounding sprites and backgrounds. The main nasty thing about the game has to be the off putting collision detection (more on this later) and the overly sized and almost mode 0 graphics, for those not in the know "MODE 0" is a chunky display mode on the Amstrad CPC, simply type that into a BASIC session and you?ll see what we mean. The game could certainly look a little better given more time and a release date a few years later but the collision detection is one huge problem when it comes to playing the game itself.

Sound

Sound is VERY basic indeed, The Power House have done quite a few titles to my knowledge and if they all sound like this one I?ll be surprised if top magazines like Amstrad Action even bothered to score them. Not a good attempt in any stretch of the imagination, in fact this almost belongs in the same range as Cascades piss poor Cassette 50.

Gameplay

Gameplay, mmm...well in short the game is practically unplayable. If we go back to that collsion detection routine we were talking about earlier for a minute, lets just say that your character touched the coral by the tip of his toe - he would loose a life, if you touch the fish a life would be lost and so on. The problem is that because of a piss poor control system (hold fire to float) you?ll never be able to keep away from these traps in the first place, on top of that if you so much as "float" a millimeter above them you?re going to loose a life.

Taking all these into consideration, Barrier Reef is hardly a game at all and we began to think that it was created simply to piss casual gamers off. It?s much easier to let go of the fire button and let the little dude drown, heck if a little coral can kill him with all that scuba gear on then he?s not much of a hero anyway. This is without doubt one of those Amstrad games that should be avoided at pretty much all costs.