Amaurote

Copyright : Mastertronic | Reviewed by : Malc Jennings

All alone in a city infested with killer insects - not a particularly enviable position to be in, but you have been selected to sort out the 2500 hi-res screens of the capital city of Paradise. So get on with it...

Graphics

Dont judge a book by its cover is the old saying, the loading screen is a bit too green for my liking and could obviously have been done a little better, but let the game continue loading and you won?t be let down at all. The in-game graphics are awesome, using a semi-3D spin on the world in which you wander about really helps to add a new depth of realism and detail to everything.

The level of detail gone into everything is absolutely spot-on, the alien planets are superbly presented and though the colours might first appear to be pretty low you?ve got to remember that different planets are hardly likely to be as bright as this one, so again it really helps. Everything runs smoothly and there are no serious graphical glitches at all, brillant.

Sound

The mighty David Whittacker provided the soundtrack to this game so it should come as absolutely no surprise that the introduction theme is absolutely fantastic, very creepy and eerie, it really helps to set the tone of the game. After hitting the fire button you might expect the music to stop and no more sounds to play? well in this case you?re wrong. We are treated to a secondary musical score by David along with some awesome sound effects as you land on the planet and blast the crap out of things, very well done.

Gameplay

Amaurote is a very nicely presented and very playable little shoot-em-up. The only problem that I had was getting used to the controls, even back in the 80s I was never one for playing games with the keyboard and preferred the stiff old style joysticks with only a single fire button than the often awkward and non definable keyboard controls. This is certainly true with Amaurote, the keys appear to be scattered about the place and it does make things slightly more difficult than you would expect.

Once you get used to them though there is nothing that would really put this game down, its fast, it looks good and it sounds good. I think you should stop reading this review and fire up your emulators.