Game Review: One Man and His Droid (Commodore 64, Mastertronic)

One Man and His Droid loads up with the loading screen being an effective version of the one on the front cassette inlay, and gives you an idea of what to come.  Some of you may remember the sheepdog trials programme on TV here in the UK, One Man and His Dog, where the sheepdog would round up the sheep with his master yelling and whistling commands.  Transport the idea into space and add the alien sheep (called Ramboids) and the sheepdog being replaced by a droid robot, and you have the foundations of what the game would become.  After the Clive Brooker original ZX Spectrum version, Adrian Sheppard took on the Commodore 64 conversion.

Up Up and Away

The game loads and you are greeted with a title and attract screen, complete with a Rob Hubbard soundtrack.  As the attract screen cycles though, there is the high score table and the option to either start a new game, or enter a password.  This version has a similar password system to the Spectrum original where you can enter a password to start at the level you may have reached previously, which is a good idea.  What you may not know is pressing down and fire at any time from the title screen gets you to the password entry: you do not have to wait for the screen to cycle round.  Once you have entered a password or just pressed fire to start, you are presented with the first challenge.

The droid needs to make the way to the top of the screen and find the cavern entrance.  However, to do this you need to get past all the Ramboids which are coming at the droid, and do force the droid downwards.  It often takes luck rather than skill on this version to be able to get to the top quickly, and often you are trapped with the number of Ramboids coming at you from all directions and get pushed down, or you hit the sides and must go back down anyway.  It is a source of frustration as you lose far too much time here, and finding the cavern entrance once at the top from there at least is a simpler task, and the droid goes into autopilot mode as it descends into the cavern.

Rounding up Ramboids

The selection of the Ramboids happens, and the effective aim on each level is to get at least four of the Ramboids rounded up in the correct order, shown at the left-hand side of the screen.  They need to be guided into the teleport which is somewhere within the maze.  The Ramboids themselves can generally only move up right bump, down left bump or vice versa.  The trick is to position your droid in the way of the path so that it changes, either by forcing a Ramboid upwards or along because the down path is blocked, or keeping them along the maze because you have blocked the up path.  Soon you will discover that the path to the teleport itself is not always simple – some Ramboids will head towards it with some simple guidance, but others need a little more coaxing.

Dig the Tunnel

Your droid has three main modes: the fly mode is the one to move around and that is what the droid is in most of the time.  Tapping the fire button switches between this as well as the dig and tunnel mode.  Dig means the droid can dig into some of the ground, meaning Ramboids can pass over without any problem.  Tunnel mode is more useful – this allows the droid to generate tunnels in the cavern, meaning that it either opens a way for the Ramboid to get to the teleport, or means that you can move quicker around the level.  The key is not to dig too many tunnels, but enough to make the Ramboids move more towards the teleport, wherever that may be.   One last mode by holding down fire shows the current location within the level of the Ramboids themselves. Do remember that you must trap at least four of the Ramboids in the correct order, or else it is game over.  Perhaps missing is a quit key so if you botch up a level, you do not have to wait for the timer to run out or all the Ramboids to hit the teleport in the wrong order.

Don’t Push Me, Ramboid!

The Ramboids can often be bunched together, which can be hard to separate them if you want to get to one of them to be the next to get to the teleport, and they can often push against you when moving around their ways.  Being quick to split them up does help hugely, as does the clever use of tunnelling to guide the Ramboids along.  It does take some time and practice, and you do think that maybe a slightly easier first couple of levels, with a simpler layout and more chance to trap the Ramboids in the correct level would help the longevity, as even early on it can get somewhat frustrating to have messed it up and not be able to continue or quit.

Eat, Sheep, Trap, Repeat

Once you have completed a level with at least four Ramboids in the correct order, you are given a time bonus based on the number of Ramboids in the right order, and then start the next level with a password and another attempt to head up to the cavern levels.  On later levels this section becomes nigh on impossible and way too frustrating for it to be worth it.  One option may have been to skip this entirely and focus more on capturing the Ramboids in the teleport, and maybe a different level layout with potentially (for example) up and down tunnelling as well as left and right.  There definitely feels like a missed opportunity here, more so because the capture sections can feel very repetitive after a time as you capture them repeatedly.

Graphics and Sound

The graphics in One Man and His Droid are reasonable at best, with the Ramboids being ported over from the Spectrum version but having well defined characteristics at least.  The cavern itself does not scroll properly, which is a shame as the Commodore 64 can smooth scroll easily enough – no excuse for this.  The backdrops are also adequate but at least serve their purpose.  The thing that stands out hugely in the game is the six minute Rob Hubbard soundtrack – it is fast-paced, at a manic speed and certainly has enough to deliver all the qualities – panic inducing, a calmer middle section with a break lifted from Hall and Oates’ Maneater (as confirmed by Rob himself, as he loathed that sax break in the middle!) before getting much more manic later on, a sort of cousin of Monty on the Run in that respect.

The sound effects are okay but nothing home to write about – and this game perhaps would be a perfect example of people buying the game purely for the Rob Hubbard tune.  Moreover, in later years this also became the loading theme for Invade-a-Load, a future Mastertronic cassette loading system developed by Richard Aplin, who also programmed the Space Invaders clone featured in the game.  Just when you thought it was safe to make a cup of tea…

Final Thoughts

One Man and His Droid tries hard to be a different game, and certainly the original Clive Brooker design promises a lot.  On this version though, it does not always deliver, with the heading up to the cavern entrance section being far too hard and frustrating at times, and left more to luck, and the main section of rounding up the Ramboids and placing them in their teleport appealing at first, but waning with its sometimes repetitive nature later.  Even with a well implemented password system to be able to get back to future levels, it does suffer somewhat from being a little bit too frustrating and ultimately, if you took the music away from this game it would be much well loved than it is.

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