Impact

Your Sinclair

Graphics 5/10

Playability 8/10

Value For Money 8/10

Addictiveness 7/10

Overall 7/10

Tony Worrall 7/10

Audiogenic Software £9.95 Reviewer: Tony Worrall Squeezing blood from a stone: that's what I call it! Audiogenic is really milking dry an already over-used game style with Impact. Yes, it's Breakout time again. Quite a few software houses have taken a profit conscious dip into the waves created by my fave game of '87 - Arkanoid. Some have been more successful than others, but so far nothing I have seen has even come close to the outstanding addictiveness and playability of the big A (except Revenge Of Doh, the Arkanoid follow up). I'm afraid Impact joins this ever growing list of also-rans. Don't get me wrong, Impact is endowed with more than its fair share of addictivity alright. I find there's something strangely compelling about whacking a tiny ball into a wall of bricks. Trouble is the game feels, and looks extremely bland, with a basic style that echos the very first Breakout games more than anything else. The programmers have made little attempt to tart up the graphics or provide all those small 'extras' that makes Arkanoid II such fun to play (and watch). Impact was the game that wowed them on the Atari (loads a money) ST, with stunning playability and above average visual and sound FX. The Speccy version looks very rough by comparison, which is surprising because it should have been easy to smarten up the program a wee bit. After the umpteenth screen of blocky, uninteresting brick walls, my attention began to wander off and do something slightly more interesting. A little more thought to appearances would have given the program a display to be proud of. Hey, enough negative vibes. There are a couple of points that help to make Impact a better buy than your average Arkanoid clone. The special token collect and weapon selection feature is a skillo idea. Just pick up enough floating tokens to light up the weapon or feature of your choice, press select and away we go! The second neat innovation is an easy to use screen designer. 80 screens are already built into the program but the designer gives you the opportunity to create a further 48. Enough there for anyone I would have thought. Impact could have been amazing with a little more effort on the programming side. What we are left with though is an entertaining package that provides a couple of clever variations on the Arkanoid theme, but not much else.

Read it at Your Sinclair Rock'n'Roll Years

Sinclair User

Overall 6/10

Jim Douglas 6/10

Label: Audiogenic Author: In-house Price: £9.95 Memory: 48K/128K Joystick: various Reviewer: Jim Douglas Well, I've been here before. About twelve times in the past few years in fact. It's Breakout all over again, or Arkanoid, or Krackout or Revenge of Doh if you can't remember that far back. You guide a little bat which moves smoothly along the bottom of the screen, bouncing a little white ball around the screen, demolishing coloured blocks and collecting falling wotsits which give you added powers. The selection business works in the same way as Slapfight. As you collect each wotsit, the next icon is illuminated down the right hand side, so it's a toss-up between whether you choose to enlarge your bat, light-up invisible blocks that break the balls into three etc. All the usual fare. An interesting add-on is the fact that you can design your own layout of screens. There are eighty already in there, so you can play it for ages without getting bored. It's a shame that you'll have played all the other versions from other companies at other (cheaper) prices first though.

Crash

Presentation 59%

Graphics 40%

Playability 64%

Addictive Qualities 66%

Overall 60%

Kati Hamza

Mark Caswell

Paul Sumner

Producer: ASL Retail Price: £9.95 Author: Steven Tucker Long ago, shrouded in the mists of time, there was an arcade game called Breakout. This game was so popular that it spawned a long line of imitators, the latest of which is ASL's Impact. Following in the normal Breakout gameplay, the player faces 90 screens to be conquered by demolition. 80 are preset, while the remainder are user definable, allowing the player to create screens of his own design. The majority of bricks only need a single hit to destroy them; others need several; some are indestructible, and to make the situation even more confused, some screens even contain invisible bricks. Wandering aimlessly around each screen are small aliens, which are destroyed on contact with the bat or ball. Although these aren't harmful themselves, they occasionally release small white bombs which incapacitate the bat momentarily on contact, enabling the ball to escape off-screen and losing the player a life. When hit, some bricks release yellow tokens which can be used to purchase one of nine pieces of equipment to aid the player in his task. These include slowdown, to reduce the speed of the ball, a torch to light up invisible bricks and lasers for wholesale destruction. Nine icons lie down the right-hand side of the screen, each corresponding to the available items. A black square highlights the currently affordable item and as tokens are gathered the square advances accordingly. If any tokens remain unused at the end of the level, they are converted into an end-of-level bonus. Five lives are provided at the start, with an extra bat being earned every 50,000 points. On some screens a bonus is attained by destroying in sequence, bricks marked with the letters BONUS. However, hitting them in any other order doesn't gain the player a bean. COMMENTS Joysticks: Cursor, Kempston, Sinclair Graphics: little imagination shown Sound: inexcusably poor Options: ten user-definable screens

Less of an impact on the Spectrum.