Roland On The Ropes

Copyright : Amsoft | Reviewed by : Malc Jennings

You have entered into a vast and dark mysterious tomb. You find yourself right at the lowest level of the tomb and must endeavour to find your way through the maze to the top encountering many hostile beings who are out to get you. Be brave and fearless as you climb your way through the numerous levels but beware...

Your stengths will fade as you are confronted with monsters, acid drops, mummies, rats, skeletons, ghosts and vampires. Your strength is monitored at the bottom of the screen together with other vital information. Being the intrepid Roland, you are able to jump over the rats to escape them, and to defend yourself you can shoot at the mummies, skeletons or vampires. But shooting the ghosts merely frightens them away and there is no escape from them. Your only means of gaining strength is by collecting the vases full of Life Elixir hidden on the tomb floors or accumulating more bullets.

Now you know the basics, on with the review.

Graphics

Now this is perhaps Rolands best adventure out of the series and one that was either cloned by Quicksilva for the ZX Spectrum or cloned by Indescomp for the Amstrad. Once again this title was given away free and was branded with that statement - it was still sold in shops for £2.99 though so it shows how little retailers care about the writing on the wall so to speak.

The graphics in this game are the most impressive out of the Amsoft series and certainly one of the most well drawn, coloured and entertaining games on the Amstrad. Indescomp have gone full out to draw ghots, rats, reptiles, scorpions, ghosts, vampires and skeletons that look amazing and use some of the best colours possible with the Amstrad computer, it was released in 1984 and you seriously wouldn?t thing so. There are however a few bugs in the game and these are mainly due to the language used to code it, as you walk around the level you will notice that the screen constantly re-draws (flickers) as you move left or right. Ghosts that pass through walls have clearly not had their background colour made invisible (you can see the black block around the sprite) among other various problems - all due to the age and nothing else.

Sound

Sound is as good as ever even though the rights have now been handed over to Indescomp, you still get the fairy tale stlye intro music at the main menu and all the sounds you could wish for during the game itself - though some of them are funny. It could have been better had the game been released at a later date and Indescomp made it commercial under the £2.99 range but it was never meant to be.

Gameplay

Gameplay is awesome also, almost every Amstrad user visiting this site and reading this review will know that this was one of the best looking and most playable games out of the Amsoft cassette collection. It?s a 2D early version of the Tomb Raider games and in my opinion Roland makes a better character than Lara (though Lara is the most sexiest character in a game - period).