C&VG


Kat Trap
By Streetwise
Spectrum 48K

 
Published in Computer & Video Games #64

Kat Trap

At last Domark prove they can come up with the goods when it comes to arcade games. Their new Streetwise label has a couple of goodies in Orbix and Kat Trap.

Kat Trap was the result of a "search for a game" competition in Crash magazine. The winner was 15-year old Jonathan Eggelton who had his design coded by a member of the Design Design team, Graham Stafford.

Design Design may have disappointed people with their Rogue Trooper offering, but Kat Trap will help revive their reputation. It's a cute arcade blaster and arcade adventure with a hero MTED, who hopefully will be turning up in other games.

Kat Trap

MTED - or Multi-Terrain Exploration Droid - is Earth's only hope against the dreaded Kat Man.

MTED has to fight his way across Earth's devastated terrain - encountering Kat Men and their horrible minions - in search of the Kat Men's computer which he must disable to rescue the Hercules 1 attack force, captured by the Kat Men.

MTED can pick up an impressive array of weapons to help in his task - these include flamethrowers, grenades, water(?), lasers, electric lances and so on.

But he has to work out which kills what - and work it out fast. Those Kat Men are mean machine manglers!

He's also got a neat grenade throwing mechanism in the top of this head which chucks out these deadly missiles as he walks and fires at the same time.

What the instructions don't tell you is that you have to push the joystick to the right when you're walking to fire your laser gun - simply pressing the button just operates the grenade-firing mechanism, which ain't a lot of good if you haven't picked up a pile of grenades.

Once MTEd has penetrated the Kat people's defences - and it's a tough job - he must deal with the Deathgrid, a device set up to protect the computer.

This is a sort of Minter-esque grid game in which you have to fire pulses to short-out electrical energy zapping around the grid. MTED gets just 60 seconds to final 15 electrical charges, otherwise he's doomed.

One irritating feature is that if you die the weapon highlighted switched back to your initial laser gun. If this happens when you are in need of an electric lance to kill Kat Men, then you have to be quick on the select key to stay in business. The joystick interferes with this process too as it can also be used to select weapons. But you end up in a tangle if the action is fast and furious.

Graphics are nice, sound is good and the game is very playable - addictive, even. Just shows what you can turn up when you let the people that actually play games have a hand in designing them. But what has John got against cats?

Kat Trap is a sort of futuristic Green Beret with a few nice gimmicks added in. It's a winner. Check it out.