Game Review: Scout (Commodore 64, Mastertronic)

Scout has a thinly veiled plot in that your space ship has travelled through hyperspace, and has ended up being broken into eight pieces. Your mission uses your scout craft to progress through the eight planets, each of them also having islands to jump between and there are features not of water, but glacial sulphuric acid.  Collide with that, and it is a case of plink, plink, fizz, like a certain famous brand.  Effectively it is a platform scrolling shoot-em-up game and you will need your wits about you so that you can progress.

Presentation Plus

The game loads with a nice little Mastertronic logo before a functional title screen, which rotates between the credits and a high score table.  The former Compunet demo Ian and Michael Jones (Ian and Mic) were behind this one, with both doing the graphics along with Rob Whitaker, and Michael doing the code.  The presentation as you would expect seems quite slick, and there is an excellent tune by Jeroen Tel that plays here and during the game.  You have eight lives, which seems somewhat generous.  And then, you start playing the game.

Plink, Plink, Fizz

Your scout craft appears on the left side, and you can move and jump, as well as shoot with the fire button.  Thankfully you can hold down fire for auto fire too, which proves useful.  Alien craft come at you in all shapes and sizes, including a helicopter, and these do whizz around the screen at some pace, which does make them hard to hit.  You will gradually progress a little further and come to a jump over the glacial acid, and this is where you will note the poor collision detection.  Even if you land well on the platform, the game will deem you to have missed, landed in the acid, and lose a life.  And that happens again.  And then again.

Weapons of Mass Obstruction

At the bottom of the screen you will note there are three weapon icons, and the one you currently have will flash.  The main weapon is a forward firing laser, which shoots at the aliens, albeit sometimes missing with the speed that the aliens head around the screen.  You will need to collect other power ups, but the instructions or the game do not tell you how to do this – I found by trial and error that some of the aliens do not move, and it is those which you need to collect.  The other weapons allow for the scout to fly (so no need to jump the platforms) as well as being able to have  a better weapon to shoot with, the wave shot.  Sadly, these only last a limited amount of time, with no warning as to when they run out, and those collectables are too easily shot in the heat of battle as well, which both seem like after thoughts to be honest.

Scouting for Bonuses

If your scout craft collides with an alien, or with the backdrop (if jumping up to a platform and you miss) or you land in the glacial acid, then a life is lost.  No respawning at the point you fell off either, it is all the way back to the start of the level to go at the planet again.  That can prove frustrating, especially if you got quite far and managed to reach towards the end.  Once the level completes you are awarded a bonus score as well as one piece of the space ship, and then it is on to the next one where more danger awaits.  There are eight levels in all so eight pieces of the ship to find by progressing through the same way.

Patterns of Pain

One flaw in the game seems to be that as much as you progress, the patterns of aliens appear a little random in terms of their height, so on some attempts you can for example avoid the helicopters, but in others you will need to shoot them.  This can sometimes lead to having to remember the different waves and positioning yourself exactly as you need to shoot or avoid the patterns.  It does get easier with practice, but losing a life and going all the way back to the start of the level really does prove to be much more of an annoyance once you get quite far.

Graphics and Sound

The graphics in Scout are good, with some nice use of multi-colour graphics for each level, some good bas relief detail on the platforms and the main scout itself looks the part, changing slightly as you progress too.  The backdrops serve their purpose with the glacial acid having some good parallax scrolling.  There are no sound effects at all, but you do get an excellent five-minute main soundtrack from Jeroen Tel which is certainly very funky and catchy showing off what he could do with all the trademarks of the Maniacs of Noise at the time, and one of his better earlier efforts too.  The high score tune is also short but sweet, and that all works nicely.

Final Thoughts

Scout has the potential be a good game with plenty of longevity.  Sadly, it is very much a case of style over substance, with the good graphics and excellent music disguising the fact that the game should have been play tested more.  A game can be hard but if it is also unfair, such as you going back to the start of a level rather than resuming close to where you lost a life, then that does somewhat kill the enthusiasm.  That alone will make it too frustrating for some to play, but the poor collision detection when landing on the platforms is somewhat unforgiveable, and the eight levels are nigh on impossible to complete apart from the most hardened gamer.   So much promise but yet so little delivered.

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