Casanova

Copyright : Iber Software | Reviewed by : Malc Jennings

Now here is a strange little platform game from IBER Software, mixing the elements of a classical music maker into the world of platform action. In Casanova you must strut about the various stages, armed only with your musical instrument and destroy knife wielding nut-cases, sex starved women and general lunatics before you become the next victim. Ok it?s not as dramatic as that but it would have sold more copies if it was.

Graphics

Now, I?m probably going to get a lot of stick for this section of the review but I?m going to say it anyway. Casanova looks like a ZX Spectrum port, why? well it?s not just the MODE 0 chunky-vision like graphics this time but rather the entire game itself, and this even stretches over onto the next part of the review.

Colours are very basic with only yellow, blue and various shades of both on offer while all other characters are coloured in the standard white. This would look fine on the old GT65 monitors but it does not impress anyone when viewed in full colour. The game has some serious speed problems too as once the screen has more than one moving sprite (character) on screen at any one time it slows down by about 15% and then a further 5% for any additional sprites. Of course this causes major problems and makes the game extremely annoying in certain areas.

Also if you view screen grab number 2 you will notice another trate from the ZX Spectrum era, both your character and the computer controlled characters are completely lost in the background if it is anything other than black. We know this is a problem that can be solved on the CPC and isn?t usually a huge problem but in this case the developers just didn?t bother - not good - not good at all.

Sound

As we mentioned above, the ZX Spectrum likeness is pulled over onto the sound section of our review. Anyone that has ever played on a ZX Spectrum will know that in some titles (not all mind) the sounds are just simple click-bleeps moving up and down, this has been copied onto this game and it seriously does sound like a Spectrum game. Again, the points are knocked down for this one.

Gameplay

Gameplay would be quite high on this one if the graphics were slightly better and less buggy than we reported. Walking about killing people with just musical notes is pretty clever and the game is quite fun to play but with the slow down and sprite problems it soon becomes quite hard to play and once you die you are forced pretty much back to the start of the game regardless of how far you managed to get.

Casanova is certainly not the most impressive Amstrad CPC titles today and we seriously doubt that the consumer would have been overly impressed on the original release date. There are some major problems and as such it?s not going to impress CPC newbies that much and can be left alone. The game had potential but it was let down in more areas than one.