Game Review: Attack Of The Mutant Camels (Atari, Mastertronic)

If, like most of you visiting this site, grew up in the 80s then you’re bound to be familiar with the name Jeff Minter and his company Llamasoft. Famed for his arcade shoot-em-ups, most of which involved some form of animals, the games were legendary and for the most part critically acclaimed. Most were “inspired” by arcade classics but you were always assured of intense arcade action and psychedellic visuals. One such classic is Attack Of The Mutant Camels which made its way to the Commodore 64 and this version for the 8-bit Atari systems…

The Force Is Strong With This One

If Attack Of The Mutant Camels looks familiar to you, there’s a good reason for that. When designing the game Jeff Minter took “inspiration” from Parker Brothers adaptation of The Empire Strikes back for the Atari 2600. Okay, it’s a blatant rip off of the console classic. Instead of attacking AT-AT walkers with a Snowspeeder, you’re in a fighter attempting to destroy giant 90 foot tall mutated camels but apart from that the game is pretty much identical.

There are several camels on each level, all walking towards your base at the far right of the stage. You have to destroy them all before they get there but each camel needs a substantion number of shots to take them out. You can fly in all directions and just like the original if you fly to the edge of the stage it wraps around and you appear at the other end so you can attack the camels from behind.

I Have A Bad Feeling About This

In typical Minter fashion, the graphics are bright bold and colourful and make superb use of the Atari’s colour palette with the camels changing shade the more hits they take. The background has a fantastic colour gradient so everything else on screen is easy to see and it moves at a blinding pace. The camels themselves are well animated and make use of expanded sprites to give the impression of scale against your fighter. Finally with the visuals, there’s a radar at the top of the screen showing your position in relation to the camels helping you to keep track of their progress.

While there’s no music of any sort, even on the title screen, Attack Of The Mutant Camels is filled with great sound effects as you’d expect from a Llamasoft title and combined with the visuals it all draws you into the action perfectly.

Attack Of The Mutant Camels – Lucky Llamasoft

Nowadays Jeff Minter wouldn’t have a chance of being able to release this commercially (Atari took action against him when he released TxK for the PS Vita), but with most games released in the 80s being based on other arcade and console titles this was another that slipped under the radar of the publishing and console giants.

In fact, if you look at his entire body of works over the years he’s released games based on Defender, Centipede, Tempest, and The Empire Strikes Back to name but a few and only TxK has faced legal action!

Aim For The Legs!

Attack Of The Mutant Camels is an incredibly addictive shooter and everything you’d expect from Jeff Minter. On my first couple of attempts I admit that frustration set in quickly as I struggled to defeat more than a couple of the camels. However a closer look at the title screen revealed plenty of options to alter not only the difficulty settings but the speed at which the camels approached.

This made an incredible difference to the game, and more importantly helped to make it accessible to everyone, something all developers should have taken note of back in the 80s, let alone developers today. Taking this into account it turns this from being a good shooter to a great one and regardless of your ability it’s something you can get stuck into straight away and quickly lose track of time playing it.

Overall

As a full price release this was great value for money and offered hours of gameplay. But as a budget re-release – and £1.99 no less – this was an essential purchase. It has everything you’d expect from a Llamasoft game – great graphics, addictive gameplay, and that “one more go” appeal. And with the difficult setting, this is one of their more accessible games as well. A true classic.

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