Producer: Calisto
Memory Required: 48K
Retail Price: £5.95
Language: Machine code
Author: S. Allaway

Your miniaturised laser tank is under attack from marauding ants which have mutated into a super-species. Your mission is to destroy them, wave after wave as they relentlessly march towards you bent on your total destruction. So says the inlay. It's a little misleading as it conjures up the idea of animated ants homing in on your tank, which isn't quite what happens.

Mutant Ant Attack is actually a grid game played out on a screen which wraps around both vertically and horizontally. Your tank and the mutant ants all move along the green lines of the grid. Should you fire, the missile travels off the screen and re-enters on the same line from behind. It's therefore essential to get off that line as fast as possible after firing if you don't want to blow yourself up.

The ants are character blocks with detail in them. They form up in lines and march about, the line gradually breaking up into clumps of individuals. The ants don't actually make a beeline (sorry) for you and content themselves with marching around, performing neat military manoeuvres along the grids.

COMMENTS

Control keys: cursors and 0 to fire
Joystick: Kempston, Protek, AGF
Keyboard play: very responsive, the cursors make life hard though
Use of colour: adequate, and bright
Graphics: small, simple but fine in context
Sound: very good
Skill levels: 1
Lives: 3

Ant Attack looks very simple at first glance, and indeed the graphics are nothing very special, being small one character sized blocks. But the beauty of the game lies in its simplicity as a grid game. You can fire continuously in any of the four directions, and your worst enemy is usually yourself! Dodging your own missiles as well as the ants becomes very exciting. That's just about all there is to the game, but I thought it was enough, and made for a highly addictive game. A (good) frustrating point is that a line of ants changes direction if one gets hit, which means your strategies, carefully planned, can all go awry. I liked it a lot.

This game bears no resemblance to the Ant Attack of Quicksilva! This grid game would be a good one indeed if it weren't for the fact that the game control is terrible - spoils it, but it is still rather addictive.

Mutant Ant Attack is incredibly simple. It's also mindblowing, headaching, maddening, addictive and wonderful! It's certainly the first game to get my brain in a mental twist. Co-ordination and lightning thinking will enable you to play this game, and in this connection a better keyboard layout would have made the game better. Best used with a joystick. You can have 10 shots on the screen at any one time and going in any of the four directions. The eleventh clears the first. The shots will also destroy each other, but it doesn't get you out of trouble because everything moves too fast! The graphics are not big or very detailed, but good enough to make for an enjoyable game. Mind-boggling.

MACHINE: Spectrum 48K
JOYSTICK: No
CATEGORY: Arcade
SUPPLIER: Calisto
PRICE: £5.95

Mutant Ant Attack is the perfect example of a great game almost ruined by a poor choice of movement keys.

Action takes place on a screen of intersecting lines along which march the so-called Mutant Ants. You control a tank which rotates and can move or fire in the direction in which it is pointing.

Unfortunately the keys chosen for this control are absolutely ludicrous. Try manoeuvring a small tank about the screen using '5' for rotate left, '6' to move, '7' to fire, and '8' to rotate right. Okay, so you can eventually get used to them, but if you've just forked out a fair sum for a game, you don't expect to have to waste your time on the controls when you could be developing your tactics instead.

This is a great pity, because Mutant Ant Attack would be a winner if it was more comfortable to play. The point is that every shot you fire goes off the edge of the screen (if it doesn't hit anything) and re-enters from the opposite side.

It will continue on its course until it hits something. This means that you can have any number of shells in the air at once, picking off the ants as they make their way in resolute formation across the screen. And of course you have to keep dodging your own shells as well as the ants.

A simple but addictive game that will only give of its hands.