Amstrad Action


Braxx Bluff
By Amsoft
Amstrad CPC464

 
Published in Amstrad Action #1

Your mission to rescue three crewmen stranded at the Bluff and return them to your base ship. To do this you have to get through six game sections requiring various skills.

You start in orbit around the planet. During some nice screen displays you automatically disengage your landing craft and take it down to the surface. Here you skim over a block graphic cityscape with an instrument landing system in the middle of the display. This is just a circle in which you have to keep a dot centred until your score has reached at least eight.

If you pass that score you will make a landing and have to fire your retro's in order to stop. You now appear as a little man at the bottom of the screen with a landscape of lines of boulders ahead of you. You have to make your way through the rocks, moving left or right when one blocks your path. This is made harder by having to stop every now and then to shoot down 'krittas' that would otherwise swoop and kill you. All the while you are homing in on the audible beacon on the vehicle containing the three men. This gets higher or lower, as does your score, until you find the "rover" at score 20.

Braxx Bluff

Now the action switches to driving through three land stages and a sea stage in the rover. The land stages are across marsh, city and desert where you're given a view through the front of the rover of the road ahead. This curves so that you're continually in danger of running off the road and crashing, and there are no second chances.

There are six rover speeds and you need to get to the end of each stage quickly or the three crewmen may die. Your task is complicated by the creatures trying to drain the rovers energy. They appear over the horizon and you have to spend precious steering seconds shooting them down with a cursor before they attach to your roof.

In the marsh you only get one creature at a time but one more is added for each of the next two sections making it harder and harder to concentrate on driving. If 30 of the creatures attach to your craft or you run off the road then that's it - but a successful journey will get you to the sea.

This is similar to the land stages but moves much faster. There is no longer a road to follow but you have to guide the rover between rocks while homing in on the sound beacon of the base ship. You can't control the rover's speed any more but there are no more creatures to threaten you.

Good News

  1. Six testing stages.
  2. Great pressure in switching between steering and shooting.
  3. Reasonable 3D graphics - certainly distinctive.

Bad News

  1. The first stage is simple and graphically uninteresting.
  2. Frustrating to work hard at each stage and then die by a little slip.
  3. Graphics are curiously undetailed.
  4. Footstep and beacon noises are guaranteed to irritate.

Second Opinion

There was a very old-fashioned feel to this game. Although it's far from easy it didn't really grab me. The graphics are reminiscent of what happens when other micros crash and the sound is terrible.