Game Review: Dynatron Mission (ZX Spectrum, Mastertronic)

You begin the game on a parachute as you approach the base.  After a few seconds, you descend vertically down into the first screen.  That is a non-playable section, and which lasts around 5 seconds.

The aim of the game is to guide the space commando around the maze layout screens to find the eight Dynatron Cores.

You have four lives to complete your mission.

Menu Screen and Attract

Before you can start, on the menu screen, there are neatly flashing blocks and a scrolling message.  The options are 1: Keyboard 2: Kempston and 3: Sinclair.  You have to wait a bit longer to discover in the scrolling message that you can press 4 to re-define the keys, 5 to a level or fire to start the game.

If you haven’t pressed fire, you’ll see 5 random screens from around the game (lasting a few seconds each) before returning to the main menu.

Oddly pressing the following on the keyboard changed the colour of the border around the menu screen.  O (Blue), P (Red), A (Magenta), A&O together (Cyan) and A&P together (Yellow).  If you know the significance of why this is (eg. a cheat mode?) then please leave a comment at the bottom of the review.  It’d be interesting to know why (thanks in advance.)

One Step Forward, Two or So Steps Back

When you lose a life, fortunately you aren’t returned right back to the start of the level.  That would have been infuriating in such a large maze game.  You may find yourself a screen or two back previously to the one you died and although that seems slightly strange, it does make some sense.

I think the logic behind this is so you can re-enter the screen again with a slightly different method (e.g. jump into it rather than just walk-in).  Although it doesn’t happen on every screen, I feel it is designed that way to guarantee a safe entrance point.

A Leap of Faith

When you jump without the fire button pressed, you do a very small and pathetic hop.  You certainly wouldn’t win a 110m hurdles race doing jumping like that.  You can come on leaps and bounds though when using the fire button (which incidentally isn’t for firing) to jumping much further across the screen.

Tactics do come into play though, as if you keep jumping around, your heart rate increases and your very long jumps get gradually smaller.  Using the trampolines can be useful as they give you an extra boost.  Pressing up with get you gradually higher up the screen without using the fire button.  Anti-gravity areas have arrows pointing upwards and you automatically float upwards towards them.  Move away from the arrows and you’ll fall when underneath them.  Luckily, you can’t die from falling to far, so leaps don’t have to be spot on.  In some places, it can look like you are walking on gaps with nothing underneath you over small gaps.  It’s obvious which ones do that after a quick couple of goes of the game and therefore isn’t a problem.

Playability

Although the controls are responsive, the jumping does feel a little a bit poor.  You think you may have jumped some blocks, only to fall downwards.  Pressing the fire button when jumping sometimes doesn’t always go as you’d expect.  Knowing when to jump with the fire button is key to playing the game but the more you play it, you’ll get more into it.  You don’t have to be pixel perfect in most cases, favouring you as the player.

Usually in this genre of game, you see all the aliens on the screen at once, but in Dynatron Mission, the aliens sometimes appear later from the side of the screens.  This makes them more interesting as they develop more. the longer you stay in them.

Pressing duck seemed when you are most in control, although you can’t always duck.  So, examples, are when standing on a moving platform or a conveyor belt.  In some places, you can run.  This is done by pressing the fire key when there is a ceiling directly above you and moving left or right.  Other places, you’ll slide diagonally on your backside!

No Major Points Scoring

If you are someone who enjoys seeing your scores going upwards, then you won’t here.  Even going through many screens, you just aren’t going to get anything at all.  This is probably because you can’t shoot aliens and it’s more a jump and duck game.  Apart from the Dynatron Reactor Cores, you don’t score a thing.

This undoubtedly explains there being no hi-score table.  After all, who wants to score a low number of points after a long go.  It’d is (for want of better words) rather pointless in most cases, quite literally.

Graphics

Dynatron Mission is a decent game graphically and one its main selling point.  It’s clear that time and effort has been taken to make the game look good.  This definitely shows and is the case.

Each screen is colourful with plenty of detail, which I liked.  The loading screen is alright, with the top third section of it taken up by the main display area during the game.  No doubt this was to save memory and keep the game moving well (by not having to re-draw that part of the screen repeatedly).

The animation is more than alright with no flickering (except large grey boxes moving up and down).  When jumping though, it does look rather poor.  Pressing duck, however is very decent though, with a few frames as you duck down and then get up again.  The best animation though being the sinewave disintegration when you lose a life.

Other animation includes the varied aliens, conveyor belts, small trampolines (where it has a rope that wibbles up and down when you either step or land on them from a hop or jump.  Other favourites are the rotating sharp spiral shapes which fall from the top of the screen and change colour when they land on the ground.  Generally, the graphics are pretty much rather decent to see.

Sound Effects Only

The game has some average sound effects.  The main one that you will hear and get tired of is your heart beating (displayed as an ECG graph in the top centre of the screen.)  After a shorth-while it’s like Chinese water torture as it repeats every 3 seconds or so.  Depending on how much energy you use, your heart rate rises and falls and therefore changes the sound (not that that makes it any better to hear.)

When you lose a life, there is a short siren followed an arcing electricity effect for a couple of seconds, which sounds rather good.

Dynatron Mission would really have benefited from a 128K AY soundtrack, purely just to cover the ECG noise up a bit.

Starting at Different Bases

A good feature built into the game is that you can start on different levels.  So, rather than repeat the same screens over again, you have different starting points, which I like.  This is certainly a plus factor as you can begin the games differently.

As we know, most games don’t let you do that at all, or have passwords, but the Dynatron Mission were good enough for me to enjoy.

* * *

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!