Deathtrack

The Good
I'll begin this review by first stating that I'm incredibly biased -- I love Deathtrack, with illogical reason. It just pushed all of my buttons, I guess. The pseudo-Road-Warrior 1980's costumes appeal to me since I grew up in that era (yes, they seem silly to me now, but they represent a more innocent time). Mad Max was a big cult hit, and being able to drive cars with rocket launchers mounted to the roof of your car and a machine gun mounted to the hood was very appealing. Dynamix also used their EGA digitizing technique to mostly good effect in capturing the actors and city pictures. For a fixed 16-color palette, it looks pretty good. (It probably served as good practice for their later self-published game David Wolf: Secret Agent.)

Playing the game is pretty easy to grasp: Choose a car, outfit it with weapons, then race. Blow up anyone in your way. Use your winnings to upgrade your car. Buy bigger weapons Try to win the championship. Not much more to it than that, but then again, it was Jeff Tunnell's philosophy that games were too complicated and punished the user; Deathtrack, conversely, feels very "easy" to play.

The economics of upgrading your car is like resource management for dummies. You kill as many people as possible to earn as much money as possible to upgrade your car as much as possible. Since I'm a dummy, it was intoxicating.

The Bad
The AI was fairly dumb; cars wouldn't put forth much effort to get you into their gunsights, so you could just go weave back and forth across the track to avoid getting shot. When you were lined up for that split second, drop a mine and say goodbye to the car. They weren't very quick to drop caltrops or mines either, so just line up a car on a straightaway, launch a missle up their tailpipe, and avoid the debris.

The weapons loadout had some inconsistencies as well; for example, you could load the front and back of your car with spikes, and literally ram/puncture people off the road. This seems okay, until you realize that these same cars can withstand multiple missle blasts, and it seems that some measly spikes (okay, BIG spikes) wouldn't be able to take them out quite so easily.

If you had just the right machine (an 80286 was ideal), the framerate was a good blend of detail and speed. But if you had a much slower or faster machine, Dynamix's way of adjusting that was to let you control how much detail was on the screen. This was fine for slower machines, but on fast machines, you can't add enough detail to get the game running properly. It's ludicrously fast on anything past a 386/33. Unfortunately, they repeated this behavior in other games, like David Wolf: Secret Agent and Motocross.

Although the city/track descriptions were quite varied with nice pictures and text, the tracks themselves all looked more or less the same.

Finally, the music was lacking, and the sound was merely sufficient. I never understood why Dynamix's early games supported Tandy/PCjr graphics just fine, but never bothered to take advantage of the built-in sound chip in those machines.

The Bottom Line
A fun futuristic racing shoot-em-up that accomplishes what it sets out to do. If you can overlook its oversights, then strap yourself in and kick some 1980's booty!