Domark's habit of bringing out James Bond film licence games several years after the film has appeared is pretty disconcerting, but in the case of The Spy Who Loved Me, things aren't so bad, since the movie was on the TV only last month (and in fact seems to be on every other month).
You may or not remember the plot; this is the one where 007 teams up with a Soviet agent, Anya Amasova (which translated from Russian means Hot Bit of Skirt) to see off web-fingered loony Karl Stromberg, who plans to start a nuclear war by kidnapping two submarines. Bond and Amasova have to penetrate Stromberg's seabase Atlantis, with the help of a Lotus Esprit which has the handy ability to work underwater.
The game reproduces four sections of the film; a race to the coast in the Lotus, a journey to Atlantis by speedboat, an underwater attack on the base and a final journey by jet-bike.
In the first section the vertical scrolling is fast but none too smooth, and though the background details of the roadside buildings viewed from above are decent, the Lotus turns a very funny shapd when you turn corners.
The idea here is to race to the coast as fast as possible, avoiding pedestrians and bollards, slowing down for crossing oil slicks and collecting tokens which entitle you to extra weaponry in later stages. Then it's a virtual repeat, this time in a motorboat, but this time you have to avoid jetties and hit ramps to leap over obstacles.
Trouble is, if you steer the wrong way around a jetty, you'll tur... into a dead end, and you can't back out.
Next there's another road race where you're attacked by helicopters, followed by the underwater routine in which you fight off enemy frogmen and subs, and finally the jet-bike section which I admit I haven't yet reached, but which I think we can all imagine.
Not at all bad in most ways; the impressive arrangement of the Bond theme music adds to the atmosphere, and despite the absence of the anti-hero Jaws from the Spectrum version. The Spy Who Loved Me must qualify as one of the better Bond movie licences.
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