Commodore User


A View To A Kill
By Domark
Commodore 64

 
Published in Commodore User #24

A View To A Kill

In A View To A Kill, you get to become the ultimate in macho superheroes - Bond. Personally I lament the day when Sean Connery hung up his Walther PPK, but you don't have to be Roger Moore. You can be George Lazenby - if you're old enough to remember him.

The plot is typical Bond stuff. You must prevent the Evil Max Zorin, European electronics magnate, from blowing Silicon Valley into the Atlantic. Though why he should want to do this is anyone's guess.

There are actually three Views To A Kill; each one loads from tape or disk after you've completed the previous one. You don't have to complete one stage before attempting the next, but it helps because you're given a coded performance rating when gives access to useful information.

A View To A Kill

The Paris Chase has you speeding through the streets after Mayday, Bond's female adversary who has just parachuted from the top of the Eiffel Tower after killing his best mate. You must arrive at the drop point at the same time as Mayday before causing irrevocable damage to your blue Renault by smashing into walls, other cars etc. It soon becomes apparent that there's no point careering around the streets at breakneck speed while Mayday's still 900ft up. So you poodle around for the ten minutes it takes her to reach a reasonable height before going after her with the aid of your radio tracker.

On to stage two. The City Hall is on fire and you must rescue yourself and Bond girl Stacey who is stuck in the lift. A sort of animated adventure where you have to move from room to room collecting useful things like keys, door passes, and a gun in order to extricate yourself from the burning building. Damned exciting stuff if you ask me.

The Mine is underneath Silicon Valley and Zorin has dropped a nuclear bomb down it. You must search the mine platform-game-style to find and defuse the bomb. Again, you must collect various objects like dynamite to blow up the walls and code numbers to defuse the bomb. As with all three games, action is accompanied by the film's theme music. If you're not nuts about Duran Duran you could always turn the volume down, but you'll miss out on the odd bits of speech which crop up every now and then.

City Hall and The Mine are excellent games in their own right. It's a shame about the Paris Chase, but the thing as a whole adds up to much more than its constituent parts. Certainly one of the better 'game of the film' implementations around.