Game Review: Canyon Warrior (ZX Spectrum, Mastertronic / PAL Developments)

You begin the game with your Mothership moving halfway up the screen and then dropping you off.  Both ships then move towards the bottom middle of the screen, with the Mothership disappear before you take control.

The alien spacecrafts start to appear and move in vertical and horizontal directions.  After a minute or so, you’ll see that some will vary in speed and swoop slightly diagonally in downward and upward manoeuvres.  The aliens aren’t shy in firing at you either with plenty of shots being fired downwards, keeping you on your toes.

The aim of the game is to defeat the four guardians and then destroy the Mothership.

Opening Sequence and Menu

Upon loading, you will see a digitised picture of the Canyon Warrior move from the bottom towards the top of the screen with a scrolling message along the lines of are you tough enough to be a canyon warrior and pull through this.

There is then a digitised picture of Ste Cork (the programmer which disappears in different colours after a few seconds) before moving onto the main menu and choice of controls.

From the main menu, you can choose the keyboard, Kempston, Cursors or Sinclair joysticks or go into the map editor.  The keys can be re-defined too and smartly; you can’t accidently select the same key twice.  So, you can’t (for example Q) for Up and then accidently press it for down, left, right or fire).

A scrolling message moves across the bottom of the screen (note that pressing 1 will reset the message to the beginning!)

Demo Mode

If you don’t press any keys on the main menu for around a minute, the game goes into a demo mode.  A nice added feature before leaping into the action.

The demo plays for around two minutes, in the first canyon before returning to the main menu.  Pressing any key during the demonstration, also does that too.

Music and Sound Effects

The game has you’re the usual sound effects and in 128K mode, has an AY soundtrack.  Tiny Williams is credited in the opening sequence for the music and FX.

The opening menu has a good, relaxed tune with soft a rhythmic beat to it.

Once the game begins though, a much faster and frantic tune plays away, giving an arcade paced feel of urgency to it.

When it’s game over, a very vaporising sound effect plays (with a very clever use of the border of the screen too, I might add!)

Playability

After the short sequence with your spacecraft being dropped off, you can then fly your spacecraft in any direction.  Responsiveness to the controls is good and I had no qualms with the collision detection either, so all very good here.

Unlike most other shoot ‘em up games (where you tend to be limited to moving around two-thirds of the way up the screen), here in Canyon Warrior, you can go to the very top.  This gives a sense of more space but at a cost.  Playing too high up the screen means that you can’t see what’s coming next.  After quite a few goes though, you’ll get to know the layout of the canyons and where the alien formations begin from.

Although you can’t see checkpoints, there are parts where if you lose a life, don’t have to go back to the start of the level.  You can pretty much tell where they are as the aliens change to different ones in places.  So, starting halfway through the canyon level, say, is better than going all the way back to the start.

Weapons

On the right-hand side of the screen displays the number of lives you have, the number of smart bombs, alien trackers and turret trackers you have and a fuel supply.

Alien Trackers give you five salvos of missiles which home in towards the aliens.  Turret Trackers do the pretty much the same thing, but home in on the turrets instead (no prizes who’d have guessed that!)  Smart Bombs will destroy everything on the screen except for weapon pods or missiles in flight.

Weapons are there to be collected throughout the canyons but just don’t shoot them or it’ll be a waste.

On the defensive side, you get four forcefields per life.  This means that you can take that many shots and/or collisions with from aliens before being blown up and losing a life.  Forcefields are therefore handy when you are in tight spots so try not to get shot too soon by easily avoided shots.  Forcefields do not protect you from collision with the canyons and is an instant loss of a spacecraft.

Don’t Be a Fuel Fool

Fuel is very important displayed as a yellow bar which gradually depletes.  You can collect more (but just make sure you don’t shoot the fuel drums to replenish your supply.)

Running out of fuel is fatal error though, as regardless of how many lives you have remaining, it results in being game over (as stated in the instructions).

Graphics

Canyon Warrior has some neatly drawn graphics, but most of the game, is generally played in black and white monochrome (apart from the right-hand side with the status details.)  As a starfield is constantly travelling down the screen, it makes sense to put the game in monochrome and prevent any colour clash.

All the spacecraft and weapons look the part, and you can tell time and effort has been put into these.  The canyon barriers add some welcome colour onto playing area frame of the screen.

Animation is very good and when you shoot anything, you will see it disintegrate into different frames before vanishing.

Loading System and Screen

Canyon Warrior uses Tiny’s Loader v1.3.  This is displayed at the bottom of the screen after the first block of the programme has loaded.

Whilst the game loads, it starts drawing the loading screen square by square (from left to right) with a green cursor.  The system has a black border (with no raster bars) and instead displays a countdown timer on the screen once the main loading screen has been fully drawn.  When the timer had counted down to 000, I expected the game to have fully loaded and begin, however, it does load a smaller chunk of data afterwards for a short while before starting.

All clever stuff!

The Map Editor

If you think you can design better levels or get bored of the ones on offer, you can change the first three levels of the game.

There is a technical warning displayed about the amount of weapon pods, fuel pods and turrets that can be on the screen and exceeding these limited means that the rest will be ignored.  It only says that the first three canyon levels can only be changed to stop the game being too easy to beat!

The editor is easy to use with a box with an X in it being moved around.  Choosing an item on the screen (or by scrolling up and down) can then be placed (or poked) into the level.

Using the boxes on the left hand-side, you can use up and down to scroll through the items.  Although there isn’t a drop-down box with all of them, you need to go through one at a time until you find the one you want.  After a while though, you get into the swing of knowing whether to choose up or down.

Saving the levels is then required to play them and pressing S, saves to tape of L to load previous ones that you’ve made.  It mentions that due to the amount of memory, only a fixed amount can be added.  This did make me think though, that there was an opportunity here to use the extra RAM in the 128K machines to add further levels.  Anyway, with an editor, it’s a massive bonus and you can use your imagination.

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