Game Review: Werewolves of London (ZX Spectrum, Mastertronic)

Werewolves of London is a misnomer. There’s only one werewolf in the game, and that’s you. You’ve been cursed by an evil aristocratic family, turning you into the aforementioned lycanthropy victim.

It’s not the ideal thing to do to an enemy is it? It more or less invites retaliation, while equipping the victim with the means to readily exact it in a swift, horrifyingly brutal fashion. Wouldn’t it be better to turn them into a vole? Something that isn’t a deadly killing machine of tooth and claw, anyway.

And naturally, that’s the plot. You’re out for revenge on your enemies and have to munch through all eight of them to win the game. To find them, you must scour streets of London, avoiding the attention of the law, who are out to stop your bloodthirsty rampage.

Of course, being a werewolf you can ignore the story and just scoff anyone who looks tasty. The police presence increases as you feed though, so if you’re not a picky eater the game gets trickier. Stick to your targets, unless you’re very hungry.

The police will either shoot you, killing you if you don’t patch yourself up with a bandage, or put you in jail, which they continue to do even as you escape every single time.

You might find other things thwart you though. More on that later.

The Gory Details

Loosely based on, or inspired by the film American Werewolf in London, Werewolves of London was planned as a full-price release, but original publisher, Ariolasoft, went out of business and Mastertronic nabbed it, launching it for £1.99 in 1989.

It’s one of those useful flippy cassettes, with the Spectrum version on one side and the Amstrad on the other. Great if you had a friend with a different system, and also likely saved a few quid on distribution.

Tricks of the Trade

Back to the game itself. There are all kinds of tricks and things to discover among the streets of London. You can leap across rooftops in your wolf form, when your jump is much longer than your human self. You can hide files in the jail cell in advance of getting arrested.

There’s a hooked item to remove manholes, and a torch that lets you see if you go down them, and also provides light as you shuffle along the train tracks between stations. Careful though, at least one train track is an infinitely long gotcha. Not particularly fun.

There are tube tickets that drop when you nobble people, but it’s more fun to vault the gates. Hyde Park is also in the game, and makes a nice break from the streets, rooftops and tube stations.

When You’re Tired of London, You’re Tired of Life

The game is fun at first as you’re prowling around, learning the ropes and hunting the first few enemies. The main downside is that it’s quite repetitive, and once you’ve got most of your targets it becomes a slog to find the rest. You spend a lot of the game just wandering around trying to find them.

There are also frequent waits when you need to be in either your wolf or human form, notably to feed or get let out of jail. Switching forms is fun at first, but one you figure the game out you’re often just waiting for the chance to do what you need to.

Sound effects are sparse, but graphically, it’s not too bad. The change of palette as night falls is quite effective and it does a good job of feeling like London, particularly as you leap the ticket gates.

The main issue with the graphics is the lack of variety. The streets all look largely the same, and as the map has a lot of loops and unintuitive snafus it makes it hard to build up a picture of how it all fits together, despite most locations quickly becoming over familiar.

The later you get the more it feels like hunting for a needle in a haystack and you just get fed up of seeing the same locations as you wander aimlessly.

A Few Bytes out of Place

Another issue with the original release is the crash bug. Apparently when you kill your last enemy, the game crashes. I thought I finished this back in the day, but it was a long time ago and my memory is a bit hazy. Perhaps I used a poke, or perhaps I just thought the crash to the title screen was what was supposed to happen at the end. Treasure Island Dizzy does the same thing, after all!

There is a bugfix release, which I used for this review. However this time around I didn’t get more than six of the evildoers, and spent an interminable amount of time wandering around without a sniff of the others, so I eventually gave up. There are videos of people completing it in reasonably good time on YouTube though.

Perhaps I triggered another bug, there were quite a few glitches and instances of me and other characters getting stuck in scenery, so it’s possible a couple of the bad guys got permanently lost.

Lost in Old London Town

There are many other ways to stuck. Wandering down a manhole without a light and then not immediately coming back up can be a death sentence, as you just wander around clueless.

There’s an ambiguity to door positioning too, leading to an awkward flipping when you move screens. Then there are the infinite train tracks mentioned previously.

Overall

Werewolves of London is often fun, but frequently very boring. At first, it’s fun to explore, though the streets are pretty repetitive once you’ve seen most of what’s there.

Though it scored a very harsh 3/10 in Your Sinclair, this is a fun game, which I’m rather fond of. It lets you explore freely and presents a coherent world with a few fun things to find and do. Bugs and glitches prevent it scoring higher, though if you get lucky and finish the game without issues you may enjoy it a lot more.

At £1.99 it provided a reasonable amount of entertainment for the money, but its rough edges mean it’s far from a classic.

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