Reviews

I can see what Adventuresoft were trying to achieve in expanding their library of adventure games, but this is perfect proof they should have stuck with making adventure games with text rather than with badly drawn sprites and minimal gameplay.

1987 US Gold (UK)
by Mike Woodroffe, Stefan Ufnowski, Graham Lilley, Teoman Irmak and Ben Daglish

Movie licensed games aren't usually good games, because producers know they will sell regardless of the content, provided that the cover includes clearly visible the name and images of said movie.
A good example can the seen in the awful gut-punching Masters of the Universe - The Arcade ahem... Game.

You start off with badly drawn characters, which could be fine in 1983/4 but not in 1987, they remind me a bit of the awful looking players in World Cup Football, and that's not just because of the graphics, but also because of the movement which is abrupt and sluggish, and again fine for 83 not for 87. And once you start moving up and down you notice there is something very wrong with this game. Still... you haven't seen nothing yet.

He-man can do very high jumps (he looks like a frog leaping) and for that you have 2 keys, one to jump left and another to jump right. Right! And he lands on wherever comes handy even if it's on top of a bush far from the angle from where he first jumped. He can also use his sword to slaughter enemy adversaries, but it's not good advice to do so, because you waste more energy that way than by actually running from them.

Colour clashing is not a problem! It was cleverly addressed by placing a square of the same color as the background behind He-Man, that way you only get an annoying square eating up the background (which is by the way, the best feature in the game).

Inside the castle there are so many bugs and unintended "traps" that I always felt I was testing this game for the programmers for free.
Then there's the sound issues. You may ask: what sound? Exactly.

There aren't many licences able to compete with the sheer ugliness of Masters of the Universe. Even Ocean's Highlander was substantially just a very poor and unplayable game, almost a non-game, but this is an interactive nightmare. Sprites are constantly surrounded by a black clash-avoiding rectangle and move in a very suffering way as if they were drowning in an aquarium through a jerky scrolling, while everything around is surrealistically silent, even when you penetrate the castle and there are enemies everywhere, some of them shooting at you. The jumping/platform aspect is terribly clumsy, as collision detection in general, as EVERYTHING else in general, including the multi-coloured sprites attempt.
One of the biggest ideas behind the game is probably U.S. Gold handing the adaptation task to Adventuresoft UK, specialized in text adventures: pure genius.
1,5/5