Game Review: One Man and His Droid (ZX Spectrum, Mastertronic)

The Only Way Is Up (Well, Not Quite)

Straight from the beginning, you need to move your Droid through a lot of fast moving Ramboids shifting left, right and downwards, the object is to reach one of the tunnels at the top to which will then put you into an automated mode and onto the objective part of main game.  Although that sounds simple, in principle, it’s not.

Firstly, the sequence of The Ramboids is mainly left and right but then without any warning, the Ramboids start moving downwards and push your Droid along with them.  If you are trapped between a few of them (usually with no escape gap), you can often be pushed all the way back to the bottom of the level.  It depends how far you got up but generally, it’s a long way down.  That can get frustrating but, it is do-able.  The randomness of the change in direction downwards requires more luck than skill which slightly ruins that opening section for me.

Secondly, if you get pushed too far to the left or right, you will also fall to the very bottom down a dotted type of tunnel.  This reminds of being in an amusement arcade where you put your coins into the tipping point style machines and the coins (in this case, your Droid) falling fall down the side.

Playability

Your Droid is responsive in all directions and can also move diagonally.  What lets it down really is the first part but once you are through that, the controls work well.

Once you are past the first awkward section, moving around the scrolling maze works well.  Changing over the different modes works well with just a tap of the fire button to change modes from flying, digging (down two blocks) and tunnelling.  This clearly shown at the bottom of the screen

Holding down the fire button allows you to see where the remaining Ramboids are in the maze.  This works by flicking through each of the remaining Ramboids which you need to round-up and capture.  The countdown stops whilst doing this process.

What would have made that more useful, would have been a birds-eye view looking down on the maze, so unless you have a rough idea where or just happen to recognise a part which looks, it doesn’t offer too much assistance to the player.

Graphics

The graphics are average but the job.  In particular, the animation your Droid is very neatly done as it rotates around.  There are no other animated sprites, so the Ramboids just face in the same direction as they move around despite what direction they are travelling in.

Scrolling around is reasonable, and One Man and His Droid doesn’t tend to struggle, even when there is a lot going on in the screen.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s not the best I’ve ever seen but I’ve seen far worse.

Along the far left of the screen are the order in which you need to capture each one (from top to bottom) and on the right are the order in which you actually captured them.

What’s The Password?

Rather than having to play through all 20 levels in order (which would take absolutely ages and be neigh on impossible to do in one sitting), there is fortunately a password system.  Having a password allows you to continue and start from where you left-off.  Back in the old days, my top-tip would have been to write them down and don’t lose the bit of paper!  Nowadays, you can easily find them on the internet of course.

From the opening screen after the programming credits and the seven top high scores are scrolled upwards (in a window) you can either start the game or go to the password section.  You don’t just type in the password but instead, you enter a horizontal tunnel and fire on each letter (a bit like putting a name into a high-score table on some other games).  Clicking the fire button on each letter selects it and once entered click fire the END box.

Sound Effects Only

There is no music in One Man and His Droid, which is a shame really.

During the game, you will hear a few sound effects, but the main annoying one is the constant ticking noise to symbolise the timer counting downwards from 9999 which is in real-time, twenty minutes (or 500 being one real minute).  When the countdown reaches 1000, it will start the to flash dark blue and yellow, giving a sense of urgency

When holding down the fire button to see each Ramboid, there is a type of buzzer style sound effect. Changing over modes from flying, digging and tunnelling creates a slightly different sound effect too.

Loading screens

There are two versions of this game with different loading screens.  One purely has One Man and His Droid written twice on the screen.

The far superior one is pretty much a great drawing from the front cover artwork of the cassette inlay tape.  Goes without saying, the latter loading screen by James Wilson is far more impressive.

Did You Know?

A 128K sequel was made, aptly named “One Man and His Droid II”.  It wasn’t commercially released, so instead, the programmer kindly put this on his own website as a free download.  Just use a search engine to find this.

Note of course that this sequel isn’t an official Mastertronic game (although I’d take an educated guess that that would have most probably been the most likely intention).

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