Commodore User


Hawkeye
By Thalamus
Amiga 500

 
Published in Commodore User #71

Hawkeye

Nice graphics and nice sound do not a game make, I once heard it say. To my mind, large and all-encompassing as it is, the only way Thalamus could have made a deserving hit out of this would have been to completely redesign the 8-bit game. They haven't.

You are Hawkeye. You have to travel over lots of scrolling landscapes. To complete each landscape, you have to collect four pieces of a puzzle. Finding the puzzle isn't a problem, after all, there aren't a lot of different places to look, only left or right. To make what might not quite be the hardest decision you've ever had to make, you use your hawk eyes. At the top of the screen, there are two hawk faces. Whenever there is something to be found, be it part of a puzzle, or extra ammunition or energy, one of the hawk's eyes flashes. This denotes whether the item is to your left or right.

The only thing stopping you from getting to the item are the enemies.

Hawkeye

There are basically lots of dumb sprites who run at you from both sides and deplete your energy if you touch them. Some are big, some are small, all of them are incredibly stupid.

So we've established the game is the game. Any change to the graphics is almost negligible, apart from the fact that they are in a higher resolution. Some of the sprites are blocky, and the animation on the main sprite is the same. Funnily enough, the scrolling has suffered and now rather than scroll smoothly, it vibrates minutely in a 'slightly out of focus' sort of way.

I wasn't inspired by the C64 version, and I'm just as uninspired by the Amiga version. A dull game, and one definitely not worth buying.

Tony Dillon