Reviews

After two games, Nightshade and Gunfright, using the scrolling Filmation 2 engine, Ultimate returned to the original Filmation engine for this next instalment in the Sabre Man saga.

Coming nearly 18 months after Knight Lore, and up against the likes of Fairlight, Batman, Highway Encounter and Quazatron from other developers, it was no longer looking particularly innovative. There were a few minor tweaks, such as the ability to shoot fireballs, but since this required an extra button there was no longer the directional control.

Once you get over the disappointment that it's yet another Ultimate rehash of an older game, Pentgram isn't too bad. There are some interesting puzzles that will appeal to fans of Knight Lore and Alien 8 who've done those two games to death. However, there was nothing particularly new here and if neither of those games won you over, this certainly won't either.

The last game in the epic Sabreman series was launched by Ultimate in 1986, when the market was flooded by so many isometric games that is the less popular of the classic Ultimate adventures, and when the company had been taken over by US Gold. In fact, the Stamper brothers reckoned in a Crash interview in 1988 that their last work as a team was Gunfright, so this game wasn't even coded by them.

This adventure offers more of the same: in a isometric haunted forest, after escaping the Knight Lore castle, Sabreman, disguised as a wizard, must find the pieces of the long-lost Pentagram.

The same good graphics, the same puzzles, the same magic atmosphere, but this time with the novelty of shooting magic fireballs when some enemies appears, and with this other new feature: when the character enters a new screen, after only a few seconds those enemies appear, so you must react quicky, no time for thinking.

A great game that doesn't dissapoint this genre's lovers.