Game Review: Speed Zone (Commodore 64, Mastertronic / PAL Developments)

Speed Zone does its best with the plot on the cassette inlay to set the scene for a space shooter game, with mention of the Sarek-Kholinor Anomaly being where vessels disappear without trace, and your Starfire craft has been sent, captained by Captain Bjorn Androm.  It is worth noting that Androm was the original working title for the game, as the original ZX Spectrum version has some speech that pronounces “Androm!” as you get ready for play.  The enemy vessel is visible on the radar with armaments all pointing at you, and the battle is on – as the fate of your survey crew is now in your hands.

I Feel the Need for Speed

All that sounds exciting enough, but your initial concerns about the game start when the game is loaded.  The title screen does have eight sprites of planets bouncing around with the game’s credits, but your ears take some punishment as the title theme plays.  It sounds awfully out of sync with a white noise cymbal, and with all the standard voices, including the lead, that you get with the Ubik’s Musik utility, and does sound like a first attempt to try and use that editor.  It just feels like it was put together in ten minutes without too much thought.

Entering the Speed Zone

Pressing fire commences play and there is a small animation showing your craft leaving a much larger ship, and this does at least look reasonable before you enter the speed zone itself.  And oh, what a disaster.  The enemies scroll across the screen at incredible speed, meaning it is more luck than judgement if you hit them or not before they hit you, and the backdrop has a poor starfield effect with an expanded sprite shape at the top right, representing where you are in the speed zone.  I doubt very much whether the resemblance to the Tardis got any sort of clearance to be used, and it becomes a blue expanded mess of characters here when you do reach that area.  You can move in all four directions as well as fire, but soon realise that this only hinders your chances of success.

Too Fast and Furious

The main flaw in the gameplay is immediately apparent from the get go.  The enemies, whether they be one of the alien craft, old telephones, or bouncing balls, just come at you in packs of four with a pre-determined pattern of zig-zagging around.  Often, they will hurtle towards the bottom of the screen where you might be, and your craft is nowhere near as fast compared to theirs, so it soon becomes apparent that you will collide with them, lose all your energy in one hit, and then lose one of your four lives that you have in the game.  The other versions show energy as shield (mis-spelled as “shield” too I should add) so a bit amiss why those handling the conversion did not do the same.  Your craft here on this version is smaller than the others, although this may prove to  be more beneficial as you dodge the enemy craft easier.

The Twilight Speed Zone

If you manage to survive enough attack waves, the next level appears, with the main change being the background graphic at the top right.  This starts out with the Tardis, followed by a satellite, a planet and what looks like a space fighter followed by a circular space station before repeating them over again.  Because they are all expanded, they look terrible and do not do anything to improve the game whatsoever apart from being a distraction.  It is more shooting with luck to score points and luck if you then make it onwards to the next levels. Boredom soon sets in as you know it will just repeat onwards with no exciting features later – once you have got past the fifth wave it is effectively back to the first, and that is your lot.

Graphics and Sound

The graphics in Speed Zone are not very good.  The main ship is reasonably defined and the introductory sequence of your craft leaving the large ship is about the best it gets.  The enemies are just a mess in general and not very well drawn, not to mention the expanded graphics for the background and the poorly designed and animated starfield.  Sound effects are just the odd clatter of sound as you shoot, and that is about that – and of course, that awful sounding title tune which will have you reaching for the volume control quickly to say the least.

Final Thoughts

Speed Zone is a dreadful game – made even more so by the fact that budget games had moved on considerably in standards, and this was well below those.  Even some of the bad Games Creator games have more playability, and you could put something together in Shoot-em-up Construction Kit in around a couple of hours and made it more appealing visually and much more playable too.  This game should never have been released and it shows just how poor a game can be without any sort of quality control present.  One for completists and collectors only – avoid.

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