Escape From The Planet Of The Robot Monsters

Copyright : Domark | Reviewed by : Malc Jennings

Produced in 1989 by Atari the Escape From The Planet Of The Robot Monsters arade machine never really did take off, despite the fact that the cartoon graphics were simply awesome and it had a great storyline.

Robot Monsters have invaded your planet and have taken our women as slaves in order to help them build a machine that will detroy every remaining human on Earth. As the new squad your mission is to transport to the planet of the robot monsters, return any and all hostages back to earth, destroy any and all robot monsters, destroy as many machines as possible and kill the reptilian guardians in order to transport safely into the next sector of the planet.

I loved the 16-bit conversions of this game and by the time it was available for the Amstrad in the UK I had already upgraded to an Atari ST (I think) before moving on to the Amiga, anyway - here?s the review for the CPC version.

Graphics

Having only played the game on the 16-bit machines and never seeing it on the arcade (until recently) I had previously never played this game so you can expect a very honest review here. I must say that I was pleasantly surprised when I started this game, even by just looking at the title screen I knew that Domark had tried their very best with the conversion, read on to see what I mean.

The graphics are very good indeed, well drawn and with an excellent use of the colour available it almost looks like the 16-bit versions that followed it. There are no hollow bugs in the game, characters do no disappear behind objects or walls and overall it comes across very well on the Amstrad. The only graphical thing that is missing from the Amstrad version of the game is the animated intro sequence that was present on the Atari ST/Amiga versions - but we never really did expect that, did we?

Sound

Sound is spot on with everything and I do mean everything you could hope for, we have bangs, whistles, crashes, the works - a full set of marks to the sound developers on this one. There is nothing bad to say about the sound in this game and that is something of a rarity during these reviews.

Gameplay

The gameplay is the only thing that we had problems with, and it?s not just the Amstrad version because this applies to even the original arcade. You cannot simply move your character left or right, you can only move him forward - which means you need to turn him in a direction then push forward to move in that direction. You?ll see what I mean when you fire the game up, other than that the game is very good indeed because it?s not overly difficult and if you have seen or played it on something else you should be willing to overlook the controls.