Label: Electronic Arts
Author: Dinamic Software
Price: £8.95
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Jim Douglas
There are very few things that make me furious and rabid with anger and despair. Games that are completely impossible from the very beginning come pretty close.
Navy Moves, the sequel to Army Moves, fact fans, is the latest offering from the people at Dinamic. They've always had a reputation for producing tough games, but I fear they've gone insane with NM.
The first section places you in a rubber dinghy, skittering along the surface of a dark and decidedly unsettled sea. You're on your way to the enemy base with a sackful of Semtex sandwiches with which to scupper the baddies' plane.
The route to the base - which actually doesn't appear until part 2 - is bloody difficult. You bounce along the water, jumping over deadly pink candyfloss, which we're told are in fact USSEX-12 mines, until you reach a safe zone, marked by a buoy. Easy? Hardly. The mines go on and on and on, and on and on and on. They come in twos and threes and on their own and they're always a slightly different distance apart. Whenever you're blown up by one, you go back to the start of the section. Most of the time there's hardly enough room to land your dinghy between the mines and you have to bounce along the water, jumping, jumping and jumping in order to get through. This stage is simply too hard. Playability depleting silliness.
Once past the first two waves of mines, you have to take on the real nasty types. Enemy troops on jetski bikes ride on from either side of the screen and fire harpoon guns at you. They also crash into you. Since there's virtually no room to move around on the play area, making enough room for yourself to turn around and fire backwards is maddeningly hard. IT'S TOO HARD! I DON'T LIKE IT!!
If you can control yourself and not hurl the joystick at the telly through ulcers and blood pressure worries, you'll get onto an underwater section where octopi and sea monsters are your foes.
Once you're inside the base, things begin to take a slightly more gentle turn. You run around the complex, dodging the agents and trying to get together the necessary goodies to blow the place sky high.
Graphically, we're talking a pretty high sophis' level. You can easily tell what everything is and everything is presented clearly. Although the play area is tiny and the scroll far from smooth, Navy Moves is far more attractive than most. It's a shame that the playability has been cursed with such a high difficulty level.
Label: Hit Squad
Memory: 48K/128K
Price: £3.99 Tape
Reviewer: Paul Rand
Bet you thought you'd seen the last of the enemy in Army Moves - if you ever managed to get to the end. Well you were wrong, chum. Those bad lads have gotten their sweaty paws on the top secret U-5544 nuclear submarine, armed to the teeth with the latest radar-homing torpedoes. Now they're intent on sailing into a major shipping area and causing all sorts of explosion-related havoc.
Time for you to take off that flak jacket a slip on your life jacket, as you take to the water and begin Operation Octopus; also known as Navy Moves.
The game is split into two parts. Part one contains three zones: the sea surface, with you going up against soldiers piloting brand-new six-speed Suzukis - very fast, very dangerous. Following that, it's time to search for the entrance to the base and capture a bathysphere, while at the same time doing battle with scubadivers and man-eating sharks.
Then it's into the bathysphere and on to the nuclear sub, trying to keep your head while those around you, such as giant octopi and sea monsters, lose theirs. Part two involves breaking into the submarine and placing a time-bomb near the nuclear reactor, before escaping with your life! Not only that, you'll need to recover identification codes from a variety of officers so that you can communicate with the sub's computer to open locked doors and suchlike.
Navy Moves looks very nice but, like Army Moves before it its just too difficult. You'll be killed time and time again for no reason other than frustrating gameplay and, after a while, it all becomes too much.
ALAN:
I have to agree with Paul on this one. Navy Moves is quite a good looking game, it's just that it's too frustrating to play. Check it out if you liked Army Moves though.
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