Hacker Chronicles 2/HACKER2.BIN/1776.HOVER.REV

Text File | 1991-06-29 | 6KB | 111 lines

 HOVERFORCE

 HOVERFORCE by Accolade is a fast-paced action game, set in a near
future, where mutant crimelords known as Alterants control the streets
of MetaCity. The Alterants traffic in Aftershock, a mind-altering drug
delivered by couriers accompanied by heavily-armed escorts. (This review
is based on the IBM version.)

 As a genetically-engineered law officer, you must destroy the drug
traffickers and stop the spread of the Aftershock drug, using an
advanced hovercraft as your weapon.

 The game play is similar to other fast arcade or action games. You
have a cockpit-level view from your hovercraft. You drive around
blasting the Alterant's drug runners and bodyguards, picking up the
colored objects they leave behind which give you scoring points or
the means to upgrade your vehicle.

 MetaCity is a green plain with groups of large colored blocks
representing buildings. Scattered street lights, shrubs, and lakes form
additional obstacles to movement. The network of lakes adds an interesting
challenge...you can cross them if you're quick, but spend more than
a few seconds over water and your hovercraft will sink. The city is
divided into four Quadrants and each one has a specific Alterant you
must destroy. The Alterant's digitized photo is shown in the mission
introduction screen. Your Enemy Disposition Display in the cockpit will
show a short digitized photo sequence of the Alterant reacting with
pleasure to hits on your ship, or going "oof" when you destroy one of
his agents. These digitized sequences are brief but fun.

 Your main target for each mission is the Runner - a "Flash Gordon"
styled red hovercraft which moves from one part of the city to another,
making drug deliveries. While chasing the runner's hovercraft through
the city you'll have to fend off or destroy his bodyguards and henchmen,
shown as armed robots and saucer-shaped vehicles.

 The sky turns dark at the beginning of each drug run, and you then
have a limited amount of time to find the Runner and blast him before
he reaches his next drop point. Each mission consists of a time
frame that includes several drug runs. At the end of that time,
if you haven't destroyed the Runner, you have failed and must repeat
the mission. If you destroy the Runner, you progress to the next
mission. It takes three missions in each quadrant to destroy a given
Alterant, so the game has a total of 12 levels. The difficulty increases
as you move through the levels, with more dangerous henchmen and
Alterants to deal with in the higher levels.

 Although the game runs in 256 color VGA, it uses a limited number
of colors for most objects, giving it an "EGA-ish" look. The buildings
are large rectangular blocks with no detail, but that does keep the frame
rate high. Even stepping my machine down to 8Mhz the frame rate was very
smooth. I was disappointed in the graphics used for the bodyguard objects.
A majority are just simple flying saucer or robot shapes. They move
around laterally and fire at you, but there's no additional animation.

 Sound is not a strong point in the game. With an Adlib or Soundblaster
card you can choose either constant music or sound effects. The sound
effects don't measure up to those of most other current games for
the IBM. Bursts of white noise are used for weapons, and most sound
effects had a excessive amount of hiss.

 The game play is hampered by the hovercraft movement. It can only
spin on its vertical axis and move forward. It can't back up or move
sideways, which makes movement around obstacles a chore. I had trouble
getting a good feel for controlling the hovercraft with a joystick -
it seemed oversensitive. I had better results using mouse or keyboard
control. Stepping my 386/33Mhz machine down to 8Mhz improved the joystick
control some, but I still had trouble overshooting the turns. Except for
the joystick control problem, the game played fine at 33Mhz.

 You aim your selected weapon by rotating your craft from side to
side. There is no elevation of the gun or missile systems so aiming
is very easy. Available weapons are a machine gun for close range, a
cannon for medium range, and missiles for long range.  The game starts
you out with just the machine gun. You must pick up cash dropped by
Alterant henchmen in order to upgrade your weapons, buy more ammunition,
or improve your hovercraft with better shields and engine capacity.

 Weapon Shop buildings are indicated on the cockpit map screen. An
indicator arrow in the cockpit will also help you find the nearest shop.
Trying to upgrade your vehicle is the most frustrating part of the
game. Once you enter, you get a series of selection screens, but
there isn't enough information on what's being offered for sale.
On some screens cryptic objects are shown and there's just no way
to know what they are or how they would improve your hovercraft.
The manual is no help, it just tells you how to find Weapon Shops
and has no list of upgrade options. Trial and error - actually buying
something and trying it out - will eventually tell you what's what,
but this information should have been in the manual or a help screen.

 As an action game, HOVERFORCE succeeds fairly well. The pace is very
fast, and racing through the maze of buildings in pursuit of the
Runner does get your adrenaline pumping.  Compared to the rest of the
game market it's only an average quality production. You can't help being
influenced by other games you've seen, and after seeing Stellar 7
(another futuristic tank action game) I was disappointed in the overall
game play and graphics in HOVERFORCE.

 HOVERFORCE is distributed on 5-1/4" 360K disks (3-1/2" available),
and copy protection uses a combination of code wheel and keyword from
the manual. Graphics support is for CGA, EGA, Tandy 16-color, and
VGA/MCGA. HOVERFORCE requires 570K free memory, which is rather a lot.
A section of the manual does a very good job of explaining how to modify
your autoexec.bat and config.sys in order to get enough free memory to
run the game. I found one major bug: Pausing the game would often cause
a lockup, requiring a reboot.

 HOVERFORCE is published and distributed by Accolade.