Game Review: Terminus (ZX Spectrum, Mastertronic / MAD)

All fun has been banned by The System that is controlling The Universe.  The System has indoctrinated everything to have total control.  There are, however, four teenage Wrangles whose mission it is to find Terminus, their leader and brains to re-educate against The System and gain freedom within the Universe once again.

A One Player Game with Four Characters

The game begins in The Teleportation Room where you get to select one of the four multi-characters known as The Wranglers to play.  Each Wrangler has their own skills and names.  They are ready to be teleported into Terminus – The Prison Planet.  To do this, you just press left or right and the coloured pad underneath changes blue to cyan and over again.  Each character also has a walking (on-the spot) animation except for MOBOD.  Presentation here looks great.

• MOBOD and XANN which move by flying and thrusting. If their energy falls, gravity takes its course and grounds them.  Once recharged, you can then take-off again.  These two can also fire lasers
• MAGNO is described as an expert cat burglar and hangs from ceilings a lot! Handy for getting him past most traps, as long as there is a ceiling to cling to
• SPEX bounces around and steers in the air and is controlled by increasing or decreasing his bounce height and clinging to walls (with good timing or you’ll fall)

Graphics

The loading screen presentation is neat and sets the scene of the prison planet in the distance.  It has a winding track to get there and is very much representative of the front inlay cover.  The planets are there too.  It’s as detailed as you’d expect in all fairness, so no criticisms here.

Terminus is filled with plenty of colour and as a metaphor, I’d say that if you had felt tip pens, you’d have used a lot of them!  Every screen that I explored all had plenty of detail.  With large aliens on some of the screens, there is generally something interesting to find.

Animation is of high quality and this all moves without slowing down any of the action causing no hitches.  A few screens in, you’ll see some quite long yellow spikes moving up and down, but my real favourite being the red lava boiling up from the ground.  Eyes also follow your movement around the screen and as you pass them, change direction giving you a Big Brother CCTV effect.

Status Bars

At the top of each screen are the Thrust, Lazer! and Energy level bars.  The longer each bar is, the more of these powers your chosen Wrangler will have.  The more you use each one, the more the respective bar decreases in length.

To restore energy, just rest a while by staying still and you’ll see the energy bar increase again and to regain lazer power, just let the bar rise around to three quarters in length to begin zapping away again.  Lazers aren’t always straight lines and are sometimes rapidly firing bubbles, depending on which Wrangler you are playing.

Playability

XANN is an extremely fast flyer and can move in all directions.  XANN can also fire horizontally and vertically (both can’t fire in both directions at the same).  MOBOD is just therefore like XANN, but has a smoother and more controlled lift-off speed.

MANGO will literally take off the second you press up.  You don’t have to hold the key down as he’ll automatically stop when he hits a ceiling.  You can press down to lower yourself but if you keep in the same position too long, you’ll fall downwards.  If Mango is on the moving upwards, he’ll fire downwards and vice versa.

SPEX is suitably named as he wears spectacles (who’d have guessed!)  I found this one to be the hardest Wrangler character to control.  If you press up, he’ll start to spring diagonally in an arc sideways direction to the way you are facing.  To bounce higher, you have to gradually build up power and gain height with each bounce.  You can tend to jump around a screen in height without clinging onto a wall.  In comparison, its quite like Wizball except, here in Terminus there are more walls and narrow corridors and a bit more control (once you get the swing of things).  If you land still, you can press attach and feet style suckers attach to the ground or wall.  This enables you to walk along the ground with out bouncing and driving yourself mad!

Sometimes, walls intentionally disappear and re-appear over a few seconds.  They didn’t stop you passing through them but did drain your energy.  The gameplay kept going though, not slowing things down.

Airlocks

Flying past switched off computer terminals unlocked airlocks to access certain screens which were blocked off.  These therefore act like keys to unlocking doorways.

Sound Effects Only

There is no music but once you leave the teleport screen, the screen it fades away with a slight noise (sounded good).

Then on the first screen, where you can enter or exit the teleporter, there was a constant buzzing noise.  That would have been really annoying throughout the game but fortunately, it only occurred on that screen.

Four Lives

Each time you lose a Wrangler, it’ll explode and take you back to The Teleporter screen with one less on the platforms to choose from.

The game will end with the destruction of your four Wranglers with a failed mission message scrolling across the bottom of the screen.

No doubt, if you complete Terminus (which I didn’t) there is another ending to the game.

Final Thoughts

There were a limited number of games which had many multiple arcade characters to play.  Full price comparisons which come to mind in a single game are Shadowfire (with six characters) and its sequel, Enigma Force (with four) both come to mind but at full price.  Terminus as a budget game, therefore bought that experience to players who maybe hadn’t played a game like this before.

In Terminus, you can play these characters in the order of your choosing so effectively, no game needs to be played in the same order.

Also, if you enjoyed mapping game screens, this would keep you rather busy!

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