Game Review: 1985 – The Day After (Commodore 64, Mastertronic)

1985 – The Day After is clearly set in a post-1984 George Orwell dystopia, with the inlay proclaiming “It is the day after, Big Brother has been destroyed, and the Earth has to learn how to survive on its own”.  You have also been assigned a mission to ensure that the planet survives.  How?  By collecting nuclear pods from neighbouring planets and retrieving them from their alien landscapes.  Once you have collected all these pods, then you will need to collect the fusion core from the most difficult cavern of them all.

Demonstrating Descents

A nice touch here, and one which is shown when loading the game up, is a demonstration mode.  It is well worth watching this to get an idea of the goal of the game and to work out what you need to do.  In effect, it is based on the idea of the arcade game Gravitar, where you need to use your ship to thrust when needed and to use the tractor beam to collect the pods when close by.  The demonstration mode straight away shows one feature you wish you could turn off: a sound effect of a siren descending in notes and repeating, throughout.  Headache inducing and makes you want to mute the sound to play this game.

Control Conundrums

When you start the game (and indeed at the start of each life) your craft launches from a central station.  Once the hatch opens, you will need to ensure you escape from here and head for one of the planets out there in space.  Left and right turns the craft, up uses the thrust and fire uses the tractor beam.  You can use the keyboard too, although the layout is truly dreadful, with the cursor down and right keys being for the thrust and tractor beam with Z and X moving left and right.  It would have maybe been sensible to allow for an option to redefine the keys more to your liking, and possibly, make playing on keys a more favourable exercise.  Somehow, playing on keys does give you a little bit more control.

Mastering The Thrust

You will learn early on that mastering the thrust of your craft is the key to success, as is patience.  Pressing up too often will soon result in an out-of-control craft which you will be compensating (and wasting fuel too) to crash a fair bit of the time.  The key here is gentle presses of thrust and more accurate steering to get round the caves.  This can however prove too difficult for some and inevitably the enjoyment of the game is spoiled, which is understandable.  Once out of the station, touching any planet (marked with different colours) takes you there to get the nuclear pods.

Pod Hunting

On most of the planet, an alien craft near the top of the screen patrols the top and does try to track you down, so often you will initially need to get out of its way as soon as possible.  The planets have armed defences which fire at you, although they cannot shoot past any landscape which can be helpful here.  However, straight away you are faced with dodging that craft, and so often without realising it you could be shooting out of control towards the surface.  A sensible tweak would have been to allow you to at least get the chance to go towards a pod without that craft straight off – more so with that annoying siren sound that plays throughout too.

Caves of Doom

On the first level, you have collected the pods from a planet (usually the grey one), and thrust off the surface of that planet, you will be taken to a cave, where the key here is to steer accurately and to retrieve the fusion core.  This is in a red cavern and has some tricky gun placements and steering required to get across to the core, and then go back the way you came and back to the surface to complete that level.  On the second level, you must collect the pods from multiple planets before you then face the cave to retrieve the fusion core.  This does make that level a lot trickier and I can imagine how harder the game is from level three onwards.

Graphics and Sound

The graphics in 1985 – The Day After are functional at best.  The planets’ surfaces are at least reasonably defined, with the thrust and tractor beam from your craft visible in all directions.  The alien craft needed some more animation, but what is here does at least define what you need to do, and the collision detection with that background is spot on.  The sound is perhaps one of the most dreadful in any game though, and while the sound effects for thrust and the alien craft are fine, that constant siren noise that plays throughout adds nothing to the game apart from the ability for you to reach for the volume control in quick time.

Final Thoughts

1985 – The Day After does at least give the Gravitar genre of games a good go, and once you are used to the controls you can master the steering of your craft well.  It does need a fair amount of patience to persevere though with the difficulty level perhaps set a little too high, which would put people off playing for that amount of time needed.  It is at least better than most of the early Games Creator releases, but could have been better had more attention been paid to the game design.

* * *

You know what we think but why not share your thoughts on this game! Let us know what you think of it in the comments below, or add your own score using the slider in the summary box at the top of the review!

Please follow and like us: