Your Sinclair


Tilt
By Linel
Spectrum 48K

 
Published in Your Sinclair #78

Tilt

So you've read the preview, played the demo, looked out of the window for a bit and brushed your teeth. Fear not! For at last, the game everyone's calling, um, Tilt is here.

It's a puzzley sort of game, very much like the ancient Locomotion. Each of the the levels is made up of an incomplete maze, with all the bits you need to finish it off scattered around the screen. A ball travels around the maze under it's own steam, and you have to whizz a pink cursor around the place, putting the maze together so that the ball can escape. Naturally, that isn't all. Icons abound in the corridors of the maze, and these do everything from transporting your ball across the screen to causing a nasty janitor to appear and steal one of your lives. What a rat, eh?

Mind The Gap

Right. Onto the wibbly bits. For a start the control method is stunningly weird. You have to get your head round the fact that your pink cursor is in fact a gap into which the pieces of maze can move - you know, like the missing tile in those plastic sliding number games you used to get in Christmas crackers. This means that whenever you move the gap, the adjacent tile moves in the opposite direction to slide into it. What this means is that every joystick move you make causes the pink blob to move in the opposite direction. (if you think it sounds confusing, you ought to try playing the game. The best way I found to cope with it was to hold the joystick upside down). This kind of game really needs pinpoint control and sadly Tilt doesn't provide it.

If by some miracle you manage to, ahem, tune your vibes to this bonkers control method, a pretty playable game is revealed. Fifty levels should keep Loco fans occupied for ages, and a two-player option and maze editor have been lobbed in for good measure. Tilt isn't a bad game, dearie me no. Its just that the bewildering controls sabotage the fun factor fatally. Draw your own conclusions. Okay I'll draw them for you. If you want a quiet, relaxing enjoyable puzzler, for heaven's sake con t get Tilt.

The atrocious controls kill the game stone dead. I'm sorry, but they just do.