Crash Powertape September 1991

The Good
The presentation is impressive and the setting quite original, with nice representations of Bobby and his hostess. Graphics and sound are smart, with some neat touches in both. A few of the adverts are highly amusing, although they repeat too quickly.

Much of the inherent game design is smart, with some intricate layouts making for a consistent challenge. The difficulty curve works reasonably well too.

The Bad
Luck played much too big a part, especially on the colour levels. All too frequently, the only square allowing you access to the rest of the screen gets covered by an X while an enemy moves across the longest line of squares, leaving you powerless to stop it, or

The control is far too skiddy and inertia-packed, making it very easy to slide into a block or enemy when you intended to stop 2 or 3 squares earlier. This is especially irksome when the block has only just appeared as you stopped moving.

The blind levels are a really bad idea, and all too frequently their completion involves nothing but trial and error - which of course means losing lots of lives along the way.

There seems to be a bug in the restart points system, as completing level 5 appears to give you access to level 9, and completing level 13 to level 17, and so on, even though that means you've jumped past 2 other levels as well as the bonus level. This makes it far too easy to storm through the levels. The question-mark bonus squares don't seem to ever have any effect either.

The Bottom Line
There's a really good game struggling to get out here, and the skittish control is the only real programming issue, but it ultimately needed a little more thought at the design stage. The end result is worth trying though, and it's good that it did eventually surface.