The Wombles

Your Sinclair

Overall 63%

Rich Pelley 63%

BARGAIN BASEMENT Torch? Check. Helmet? Check. Ability to write incredibly informative and witty reviews? Check. (Sort of.) Say hello to RICH PELLEY & JON PILLAR. THE WOMBLES Alternative £2.99 Reviewer: Rich Pelley Apart from providing a rather unfortunate opportunity to crack lots of crap 'Womble' jokes (What do you call a Womble with a strange tropical disease? Uncle Malaria. What do you call a Womble with no hair? Uncle Bald Area etc etc), unfortunately this Womble game also allows us to have yet another go at Alternative for accidentally forgetting to write most of the game to go with the cartoony graphics. The problem is, once again, that there just isn't enough substance to the game. Un-spookily, it's a flip-screen arcade adventure, and here's where the problems begin. You don't find your way around by taking note of the scenery (it doesn't change a lot) as much by following a little map at the bottom of the screen. This would be fine it there was enough action to keep you interested, but there ain't. All you, as Orinoco, have to do is to walk around putting litter into bins, locating objects for Tobermory when requested and ultimately finding a copy of The Times for Great Uncle B. The only real action is whether or not you can do these last enough, as failing will lose either energy or the game. You also have to avoid Wellington as he indirectly causes you to lose energy. And as I've mentioned it's all rather boring. However, in true journalistic indecisiveness, I'll just point out before I go that this game is far from being completely tragic. It's just it hasn't got enough going for it to deter you from buying one of the other far better budget games around instead.

Here we have The Wombles - certainly not one of Alternative's finest five minutes 53 seconds (which, incidentally, is how long it takes to load).