Reviews

1986 US Gold (UK)
by Paul Houbart, Simon Butler, Dawn Drake and Noel Hines

Never liked this game, its just a badly made avoid-or-get-blown-up kind of game and the Spectrum conversion is a bad one.
Shoddy graphics, unresponsive controls, bad collision detection and that tune in the beginning, just makes either laugh or cry.

by Paul Houbart, Simon Butler, Dawn Drake, Noel Hines
I didn't have bad memories about this game, in spite of it being universally panned, because I didn't dislike it at that time. Of course, I was wrong. I've tried it again today and the collision detection is awful. The backgrounds are well drawn and nicely coloured though.
2/5

I have never played the arcade game so I can't compare them, but surely the arcade game can't be as hideous as this is can it? This is absolutely terrible! It plays horrendously bad! It's got awful controls, awful music, awful hit detection, it's almost impossible to progress and it's even more impossible to just survive! The graphics are fine, nothing wrong with them, but the game is just terribly programmed. I feel I should give it a 2 for the graphics but then this game is so bad how can I give it anything but 1? As a conversion I can't judge it, but I can judge it as a game however, and it's simple, it's shite, and you know it's a bad game when it wasn't even released on US Gold's budget label.

Now that I look back I played this game way more than it deserved back in the 80's. Now that I think back to that time, me, and a couple of my friends actually liked that game for a while.

Until we discovered one awesome thing! If you hold the jump button down you're invincible, and you don't die in water, and you can also jump into and across rocks.....

Breakthru was potentially the easist speccy game ever made. However sometimes you'd get stuck in an endless loop of Scenery on the last level, and eventually die if you let go of the jump button.

Basically a broken mess that should not have been released in the state it was in, and was an absolute joke that it was. Full price for this as well, daylight robbery.


No real fond memories here, I think I dropped my rose tinted spex and broke them on the way to throw this pile of crap straight through the window of the nearest WHSmiths.

The arcade game isn't all that great, but this port is absolutely laughably horrific. It's clear poor Paul Houbart wasn't really cut out to program games, given this is bad, Wizard Warz isn't much to shout about either and that he pretty much done a rubbish job with Total Recall before it was handed off to a new team.