Game Review: Action Force (ZX Spectrum, Mastertronic / MAD / Virgin Games)

Side and Vertical Scrolling

The game’s action is played in a framed section of the screen.  Having counted, it is limited to 26 squares in width and 11 in height at any one time displayed on the screen).  The remainder around the edges purely being decorative, displaying your score and the number of you have (shown as bullets).  The game area is bigger as you can scroll and downwards, but you’ll always be in the 26×11 displayed area.

When you fly to the furthest left or right of the levels, the screen will just stop with no obvious barrier.  It’s as if thin air has stopped you in your tracks!  You just need to turnaround and fly back in the opposite direction.  After all, there were no Open-World games back in the 1980’s (and this is no fault of the game at all).  It’s purely down to the memory constraints where every byte counted; I digress!  There are however, 8 levels with increasing difficulty.

The Logistics of Action Force

The aim of the game is to get your A.E.W. Striker vehicle successfully from the left of each level and the eastern (right side of each level).  To do this, you must pick up pontoon parts to make a bridge, by placing them in-front of your vehicle (which drives itself).  In places, you’ll have to shoot through barriers and not drown.

Playability

For an action game, responsiveness to controls should ideally be essential, but they aren’t by a long distance.  This isn’t helped by the keyboard, as they keys aren’t re-definable.  This is a pity as the keys are 1 (up), A (down), I (left), P (right) and any key on the bottom row to fire.  Personally, I much prefer Q, A, O, P and N myself, so it just didn’t feel right to me.  The scrolling message does mention “Ever So Infuriating Gameplay” before you play the game, and they programmers weren’t kidding!  It can be infuriating at times.  There are plenty of times where I wanted to stop moving and what seemed like a lack of control.

You can’t just instantly turn left or right and pressing the opposite horizontal direction makes your helipack stop and hover.  Pressing the same key again then makes you rotate twice at 90 degrees and to face the other way.  Yes, it’s more realistic but it can leave you feeling like a sitting duck for a few seconds, and unresponsiveness in an action game can be a killer!  Look out for those fast rockets being shot upwards before doing a manoeuvre.  Firing though is good though with shots flying across the screen.

Some thought has gone into the gameplay though, assisting with the playability.  Action Force would have been a very cruel game if you got killed for flying into the side of any of the buildings, for example.  Luckily, you stop beforehand and don’t get splatted against a wall.  There are exceptions of course, such as flying into a jeep (displaying in large letters You just blew the jeep up) or crash landing into water (showing Splash).  The scrolling message mentions you (Snake Eyes) swims like …. concrete).  Anyway, these are, after all, reasonable enough reasons to crash or drown and lose a life, so fair play.

Graphics

It must be said that the loading screen is of an extremely high standard, setting a real atmosphere that a combat missions are about to commence.  The detail and use of colour really does standout here so full credit for this must be given.

The graphics in the game are well drawn and are colourful (in fact, reading the scrolling message comments on parallax scrolling water as well as other details).  The tanks, rockets and jeeps look good but the hovering of your helipack does give a bit of motion sickness about it.  It deliberately bobs slightly up and down to give that sense of flying through the air.

Music and Sound Effects

Once the game has loaded, if you leave the computer running for about a minute, you’ll see an Action Force logo flip over a couple of times and onto the high score table.  After that sequence, you will hear a passable 1-bit track of 48K music until you press any key.

Selecting which control you want will make a short sound and during the game, when firing, you’ll hear just tapping noises and getting hit, results in three short notes being played.

Fuel Levels

As you can imagine, flying requires fuel so you will have to collect the fuel pods when needed.  Collect them too early and you can run out and obviously too slowly when you need it results in disaster too.

Apart from a message in the top-right showing Fuel Low where your score was, there is no sound effect to alert you, and this can be easily missed.

Finally…  Strange Loading Tape Delays

What I found very odd about the way Action Force loaded was that after each header, there was a very long silence before it continued to load in the main parts.  It’s must have been deliberately done for some reason, but I can’t see any purpose behind it (eg. copy protection).  It just added a very unnecessary 10-15 seconds of silence on the tape adding to the loading time.

The game maybe called Action Force but clearly no sense of action or urgency was added in the loading process.

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