Game Review: Loco-Motion (ZX Spectrum, Mastertronic)

Full Steam Ahead!

Your locomotive always departs from the bottom-right area of the screen.  Along the bottom and left-hand side of the screen, track is also correctly laid and can’t be shifted around.

All other areas of the screen can be slid around one tile at a time.  Should you find yourself starting to run-out of a clear track (or just panic!), you can press 0 (or the fire button on a joystick).  This starts a one-minute times and pauses your locomotive.  During that time, you can shift tiles around into place.  Although a minute may sound a while, it really isn’t when you’re up against it!

Strategic Planning

Locomotion is a strategic arcade game, where the aim is to drive your locomotive back to the other side of the railway station from where you started from.

In each city, however, the track has not been correctly laid.  Each one has its own obstacles and utilities way with some bonuses along the way.  You must correct this by sliding tiles of train track, obstacles or hazards into place to and keep the railway line clear.  Failure to do so will ultimately result in a nasty crash and losing a life!

Well, That’s Amazing!

I really “must” mention the loading screen for Locomotion, as it really is an amazing standout feature!  In fact, I’d probably go as far as saying that this is the cleverest loading screen that I’ve ever seen!

It is smoothly animated with tiles sliding around as the game loads.  The tiles begin jumbled up and then proceed to solve a puzzle by putting the locomotive track into the correct order!  It really is a clever piece or programming and impressed me hugely.  Honestly, I recommend that you look!

Sound Effects and Music

Throughout the screens and high score table, there is a few short notes played.  I wouldn’t quite call it music, but it’s okay. When you complete a track, there is a laborious beep as each piece of yellow track (that you put into the correct place) start flashing white.

There is a nicely sampled crash noise when you do make an error and crash your locomotive.

Graphics and Colour

Locomotion has plenty of colour throughout and used it well.  The tiles all move smoothly and there is never any colour-clash at all.

Each screen has the name of the European city name in the-top right-hand corner and underneath, a stop-clock.  By activating the pause facility, this starts a countdown, and it starts flashing different colours.  Once the countdown has ended, it amusingly turns into an unhappy face on the front of the locomotive!

Playability

The movement of the tiles respond instantly and can’t be faulted.  The train may appear to move quite slowly, but you’ll soon realise why it travels at that speed.  If it were to go any faster, it’d be near impossible to play, so the speed has been done right.

That said though, the difficulty level is rather high, and you’ll need your wits about you.  One thing you can’t do though is blame the game for being unresponsive.

One thing I did find though was once your countdown timer had been used up; you could hold down the 0 key.  This caused a re-occurring beep, effectively pausing the game.  Unlike the real countdown timer though, you can’t move the tiles around but does enable you to think through where to place the certain tiles without any penalty!  Although not being a cheat, it’s more of a helping hand.

Criticism

The one thing I feel that Locomotion could have done with though is a password system to start in different cities.  It can take a while to go through each level.  You may argue that takes the challenge away from it, but at the same time, if you don’t want to cheat, you don’t have to use it.

One other thing, te nice inlay cover shows the game title with a hyphen in it, but the game itself doesn’t.

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