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This was the first shoot 'em up to use the isometric 3D graphics introduced by Ultimate. It was written by Costa Panayi who had already had success with Android, Android 2 and TLL. You control a droid which must progress up a road clearing it of vicious aliens who, as usual, are there to give you merry hell. If this wasn't tricky enough, you also have to play the game against the clock. Like all of Panayi's 3D efforts, it is beautiful to look at and a delight to play.

THE ORDERLY advance of the aliens to destroy civilisation as Slugger would like it to be, is given a new twist in Highway Encounter from Vortex. The aliens stick to the main road, and your job is to ferry the lasertron to their base where it will obliterate the nasties.


The twist is the combination of state-of-the-art Knight Lore graphics with straight shoot-'em-up button bashing. The lasertron is propelled by a chain of five Vortons, dalek-like robots with guns in their heads. You control one Vorton at a time, but the other four will continue to move the lasertron forward if they can, and are thus vulnerable to attack. It seems particularly devious to design a game where you can lose your other lives before you even get to play them.

There are 32 screens of 3D highway to negotiate, each one containing a problem of its own. Some involve moving oil-drums around to prepare the way for the lasertron, others are free-for-all scraps with the aliens. The most difficult involve both.

The aliens have an innocent fury about them. Some look like rejects from a remake of War of the Worlds; others resemble psychotic eggs. Vortex promises staggering effects when the lasertron is finally brought to its destructive goal.

In many respects the game is superior to Knight Lore and Alien 8, in that everything moves faster and in a true eight directions. There is colour in the screens, though not much, and most importantly, the action continues off-screen so you can't hang about for long trying to work out the best tactics. Weaknessess include less variety in the problems, and the lack of a maze - the highway is a simple straight road, easy to wander along to the end, but much more difficult to negotiate with the lasertron in tow.

It is a long time since we last saw a Vortex game - TLL and Cyclone were the last products. Highway Encounter is the best yet, innovative and addictive, and should go down a treat this summer.


Publisher Vortex Price £7.95
Memory 48K Joystick Kempston, Sinclair, Cursor
*****

Chris Bourne

It's been a long time since we have received anything from this well known and widely acclaimed author; his 3D graphics are both distinctive and cleverly applied.

Highway Encounter has a simple plot. You control a droid or Vorton, which has the simple task of taking an explosive device from one end of a straight road to the enemy base at the other. If the device is successfully delivered then the enemy advance will be halted and you will have won. You view the action from an oblique aerial angle, seeing one complete section of road at a time. In all you have a total of five droids under your command, but you can only directly control one at any given time. The remaining droids are automatically programmed to push the device down the centre of the road until they meet an obstruction whereupon they come to a dead stop.

The control droid is steered in a similar way to the robot in Alien 8. To move in a given direction you must first rotate until the droid is facing the appropriate way and then move forward. This is a difficult system to come to terms with: the droid reacts as if subject to inertia, and it takes some time to accelerate to full speed and seemingly even longer to come to a halt.

At first sight the game looks very simple - so long as the road ahead is clear the explosive device and automatic droids will make their way down the middle of the road. They will only stop if their path is blocked, as it frequently will be. Most of the blockages are caused by large barrels and boxes left lying around but very soon you realise that although these objects are a pain they can in fact be put to very good use. You see, the enemy aren't just sitting back waiting for you and your bomb to turn up on their doorstep... they have some pretty smart defence systems waiting for you. The first type take the form of stationary mines, if you collide with one then you lose a droid and will have to take over one of the automatic ones. The mobile mines are a bit more of a problem, they slide back and forth across the width of the road and while you can dodge them with the controlled droid, the only way of ensuring a safe passage for the rest of your party is to block the mines in against the wall with boxes or barrels.

Generally the controlled droid can nudge objects along the road, but it is often quicker to manoeuver them into place by firing laser bolts at them. Sometimes more than one object can be moved at a time, but the whole operation becomes a lot slower. Beware of the objects that look like boxes but in fact melt when fired at. The laser fires in bolts of three blasts, each blast sending out a sort of hairy bullet thingy which hits home with devastating effect. However, after firing a burst of three bolts the laser pauses briefly to re-charge and this can be a bit of a problem when it comes to dealing with the third type of defence system - the enemy's droids.

The enemy machines come in all shapes and sizes, and some just seem to wander about while others actively hunt for you. They vary in the way they move, while some droids are prepared to try a frontal assault and are easy to take care of, others sneak up on you while their allies draw your fire. Clearing a path along the highway becomes progressively more difficult. To start with, you find it fairly easy to move items around to block the mines off, later on, not only do the mines appear in larger groups, but they move more erratically and your attempts to trap them will be hampered by ever increasing numbers of nasties attacking you.

To make matters worse the game has a time limit for completion. The amount of time remaining is shown by a bar graph on the lower part of the screen. Within the same area you are told how many droid Vortons you have left and which of the 30 zones you are in. Points are awarded according to how many droids have reached which zone. The more droids you have surviving and the nearer the end of the road they are, the more points you will score.

Producer: Vortex
Memory required: 48K
Price: £7.95
Language: machine code
Autho