Producer: Firebird
Retail Price: £1.99
Author: Andromeda Software

In the world of international troubleshooting, improvisation is the key. The American oil-rig disaster expert Red Adair once stopped a major blowout with his secretary's hairpin! They don't make them like that anymore.

But in Pneumatic Hammers YOU are the troubleshooter...

At the bottom of the Lee Valley a gold-research base is threatened by constant landslides caused by its overactive pile-drivers. The handle that operates these hammers has sheered off, rendering the machine uncontrollable.

Having evacuated the base the operators get in touch with you, Red O'Blair, troubleshooter supreme. Your job is to shut down the plant by replacing the missing lever, before the pile-drivers bury the base and cause catastrophic damage to the nearby towns.

The research base consists of five rooms connected by a lift. The building is in the middle of a river running through a canyon; piles are driven into the riverbed on either side, and rubble from the landslides slopes upward from the river's edge.

The only way to get another handle for the wild hammers is to cast one from the most abundant metal in the area, gold, unearthed by the landslides.

To get to the mineral-rich rubble you hop across the river, using the piles as stepping stones.

When enough gold has been collected you can leg it back to base and test the gold for purity. Then it's off to the furnace to melt it down and cast a new handle.

The game ends if the rubble level outside gets too high, crushing the base-and you with it.

COMMENTS

Control keys: Z left, X right, K up, M down, L jump
Use of colour: lots
Graphics: primitive
Sound: appalling spot Fect
Skill levels: definable
Screens: eight

Pneumatic Hammers is one heavy-going game. What little there is to do is repetitive and boring, and the graphics do little to enhance the game - none of them are very convincing and all are crudely drawn.
PAUL

What a weird little game! Pneumatic Hammers is the most uninteresting, unplayable game I've seen lately. The graphics would have been passable three years ago, but by today's standards they're pathetic.
NICK

Pneumatic Hammers is well original - but it's a failure. The gameplay is very limited, with only one major task, and gets monotonous and infuriating. The graphics are bad, the screen display looks amateurish, and there are some nasty attribute problems and badly-animated characters.
BEN

Firebird
£1.99

Can't think why they gave this to me unless it's because of my naturally bouncy... personality. Anyhow, it takes a bit of resilience to rebound when you're presented with a crusher like this.

The game's mine, but that doesn't mean that I want it, because this is the underground sort of mine where they tunnel for gold with automatic hammers. There's almost everything in this place, including metal detectors and a smelting plant, but the one thing they could do with is a handle to shut it all down, so guess what you've got to do...

To construct the handle you have to dig gold - and I sure dig it but in rings and things, not games like this. It took me an age to work out what I was doing as this is yet another Firebird game where the cramped inlay card makes the instructions indecipherable.

Seems that the basic procedure is to get out of the lift as you drop from the roof, using a hand/pointer to switch on the furnace and thermostat, and pick up a metal detector. Then you descend to the basement to play a game of turtle bridge beneath the pneumatic hammers.

Once you're across at the rock face you can move the hand around listening to the detector buzz until you locate an ingot, which seems to be a chance affair, even with the audible aid. Then you weigh it to determine its purity and if it's okay you can start making a pile by the furnace until you're ready to melt it all down. Beware of rock slides though, because they'll cause you to lose everything that you're not carrying.

I suspect there was once a good game in here, and in its other versions it could be a very different, rather frantic, romp. But the Spectrum conversion is so bad as to be almost unplayable. In the end the only 'off' handle I wanted was for my Spectrum!

Label: Firebird
Price: £1.99
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: None
Reviewer: Andy Moss

Just because a game's in a budget range shouldn't mean that it's a poor quality product. Pneumatic Hammers well and truly squashes that theory. First of all there are spelling errors in the opening screen, and then in the game proper there's no joystick option. I ask you, in this day and age, not even a Kempston look-a-like! The game is littered with attribute clash and the instructions are wrong. Apart from that there's a semblance of a game in there somewhere, it just suffers from plain bad programming.