A&B Computing
1st January 1985
Published in A&B Computing 2.02
Unfortunately however, playing the game comes as a bit of a let down after the rather impressive build-up. The polar bears look far from menacing. In fact, they look nothing like polar bears, whilst the Arctic scenery is none too convincing either.
The idea of the game is to guide your eskimo across the icy wilderness of the Arctic trying to achieve certain taks whilst avoiding the bears and other nasty hazards. Scene one finds you jumping your man from one drifting ice floe to another to reach the safety of the far shore of the sea. On the way, you must avoid the polar bear who is also leaping his way around the ice floes in an effort to flatten you. You can land on one of the islands in the sea to grab a spear and then kill the bear when he gets close to you.
Although this all sounds quite exciting, in practice it's real yawn-a-minute stuff as the drifting ice floes just keep on drifting and drifting and drifting... This means you have to wait patiently until your ice floe drifts near enough to be able to leap onto another and makes it all very tedious.
Later screens which feature tasks such as kayaking between icebergs and plotting your way across the thin ice of a frozen lake are no more challenging or interesting than the first.
The graphics in Polar Perils are just about passable but show little flair, imagination or originality. Use of sound is reasonably good but nowhere near outstanding either. The only thing I could find commendable about this game is that it features good facilities such as freeze game, abort game, sound on/off, user-definable keys, joystick option and a high score table.
Sorry Squirrelsoft, but you'll have to do better than this these days, especially at the price you're asked when games of the calibre of Frak are available for a similar amount of money.
Other Acorn Electron Game Reviews By Peter Rochford
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