Planet Bob - Alleykat

RSS Bot · April 3, 2006

Hi there!

And here comes the next Graftgold entry in this series:

Alleykat

Ratings:

Zzap! Rating: 89%

Lemon64: 7.0

Staff: Steve Turner (music) Andrew Braybrook (everything else)

Overview:

A vertical scrolling mixture between a shoot'em up and a racing game. Actually I think it's a shoot'em up in racing game cloth.

There's 32 different races on planetary surfaces, all with varying ground obstacles and attacking enemies. There's also different bonus goals for each race like destroy as much of the obstacles or survive as long as you can.

Actually I find it a bit weird calling this "races" at all, because there's neither rankings nor other racers on the track...

Fun in 2006:

Well, after three hits in a row from Andrew, this one sucks really bad. Basically it is sitting between both chairs, as neither the racing portion is fun nor the shoot'em up elements. Same goes with the weird controls. They're two layered: With the fire button pressed everything works differently than when it's not. Since you're actually firing your cannons with the fire button as well, occasionally it's more or less acccident wether your ship dives or speeds up for example... I tried for ~ an hour, but mostly I got to see my ship exploding, as in the picture :ponder:

(=> Makes one really wonder why this is included in the C64 DTV instead of Gribbly!)

Alleykat compared to the previous Graftgold titles:

Major difference is that it sucks. Especially the controls kill it, a part that was usuallly executed flawless in all of Andrews earlier efforts. The SFX are again similar to the ones from Paradroid, but that is already the most positive aspect of the whole game.

Greetings,

Manuel

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?a...&showentry=1436