Rocket Ranger

The story so far… It's 1941 and Adolf Hitler is pushing the boundaries of his Third Reich, not just across Europe, but all over the world. His powerful forces run rough-shod over all opposition, but there is one man who may be able to put a stop to his land reclamation – the flier with a difference, the one they call... Rocket Ranger (um, that's you, of course). Rocky owes his power of flight to a back-mounted rocket pack which runs on the mystery mineral Lunarium, a rare substance which yield enormous power if handled correctly but staggeringly dangerous if used for nefarious (whassat? – Ed) purposes.

Another excellent job of conversion makes this very attractive on the PC. The graphics have come over well, although some sequences have been changed. Notably there is no conversation on the Zeppelin.

Schau an, was haben wir denn da? Man nehme einen gut abgehangenen Flash Gordon, einen Stapel alter Comics, ein paar Geschicklichkeitsspiele,einen Schuß “Afterburner“ und schüttle ein wenig: Schwupp, schon haben wir einen Rockel Ranger-Cocktail, der vortrefflich mundet. Grafik und Sound sind Spitzenklasse. Wer sich nicht daran stört, daß sich hinter der tollen Aufmachung recht normale Action- und Taktik-Spielereien verbergen, wird sicher ein Rocket-Ranger-Fan. Ich bin‘s schon.

On the box of this game there's a quote which says "Rocket Ranger is.... a real landmark in Amiga software, and for once they're right. When it first came out, Rocket Ranger featured probably the most stunning graphics ever seen on any home computer, and digitised music that gave the game a feel befitting the name of the company that produced it, Cinemaware.

Well, it looks like I'm nearing the end of this review, and I have yet to cover a few things. So I'll just cram them into this final paragraph. You have to pause the game or beat it in order to hear any music. The music sucks. There would need to be more gameplay for the controls to be any worse. There's not a whole lot you can do to avoid losing the game. "Powerless the Video Game" would be a more appropriate name. I had to constantly reload the saved game on my emulator in order to beat it. I really wish I hadn't wasted the time.