Reviews

This is supposedly "almost equal to" Wild West Hero, my previous review. However as it turns out the only similarity in the two games is they are both Robotron games. For a game to be deemed "almost equal to", it would have to be essentially the same game with the same code but with slight changes to avoid it being a carbon copy. A good example of this is Bride of Frankenstein and Frankenstein Jnr where the only difference is the character sprites are a bride in one and Frankenstein in the other and in the latter the puzzles were different, other than that it's the same game. Also Zeppelin Games were notorious for copying codes from one game to another, Santa's Christmas Capers for instance is directly copied from another shooter they released, Q10 Tankbuster I believe it was called. Despite looking all Christmasy it was essentially the same code and thus the same game. Here we have another Robotron game, but the graphics are different, the player is different, the game has music and the goal is different. In Wild West Hero you had to shoot everyone to finish the level, here you have to shoot what you can and avoid the enemies that cannot be shot whilst waiting for a colouring version of you to appear and you must walk up to him and finish the level, which I believe was the goal of the original Robotron, you had to rescue members of your family. So in essence, although it is a second Robotron clone from Silicon Kid, which this and Wild West Hero were the only two games they did, it is a different game, written in a different code with different graphics and a different objective. Now World of Spectrum aren't the only ones "claiming" that this game is a copy of Wild West Hero. As it turns out Personal Computer Games magazine described the game as "almost identical" to Wild West Hero in their review of the game, after which Mike Stockwell, the writer of both games, complained in a letter to the magazine which prompted an apology from them. So case closed, they are not "almost identical" or "almost equal to" at all, they are similar yes as it's Robotron and the awful keyboard layout remains the same, but they are not carbon copies of each other. And after all that it's worth pointing out that Wild West Hero is by far and away the better game of the two. This does appear to fix the slowdown issues of the game, but the chunkier graphics hurt the game and so does the fact that you can't shoot everything as they just get in the way of the objective of rescuing your brother or cousin or whatever he's supposed to be. It just lacked the same enjoyment as Wild West Hero and it didn't take long, precisely after hearing the game's music as a matter of fact, for me to prefer playing that instead of this.

1984 Timescape Software (UK)
by Mike Stockwell and Paul Holmes

Yet another clone of the old arcade game Robotron 2084. Plays very fast and it's a nice shoot 'em up type of game set in one screen at a time, but lacks something, I felt the same with other Robotron 2084 clones, such as Wild West Hero, maybe because it's based on already outdated game, with an outdated gameplay, or maybe because it becomes repetitive after awhile, it's nonetheless a fun shooter.