Microvalue/Tynesoft
£14.95
`Deep within the caverns of the planet Cosmia a
lifetime struggle for freedom is being lost. Kreezers from all over
the planet are being captured by the ghoulish monsters who inhabit
the planet craters'
Your job in Frostbyte is to take on the task of rescuing the
captured Kreezers from their cages, which are spaced well apart from
one another in the underground caverns. You were also once
imprisoned, but you managed to escape, and upon leaving your cage
came across a form of gun which can be used to destroy some of the
'ghouls'.
On your travels through the caverns and passages you will come
across three different sorts of coloured 'sweets' which will enable
your Kreezer to either move faster, jump higher, or fall further.
These sweets will last indefinitely or until you pick
up and use another sweet with a different effect. Also you will come
across many different varieties of colourful monsters, some which
will kill and some which won't, some which can be killed and some
which can't.
Graphically the game is very bold and colourful,
although in some places the use of dithering (dots of different
colours to make darker shades etc.) has been overdone a little. The
sound is quite good, and the twenty or so seconds of sampled music
on the loading screen would be near enough perfect if it were not
for the fact that it stops half way through a phrase. The sprites in
the game, from your 'Slinky' like Kreezer to the hundreds of
different ghouls, are all very colourful, and in most cases very
smoothly animated. My only real complaints about the game are the
difficulties which I had in getting it to load. To start with it
would not load on my 1 meg drive, so I had to change the cables
around to make my half meg drive Disk A. Secondly, when loading on
the half meg it was rather temperamental and more often than not
would 'bomb' out on first try. It usually loaded on the second or
third attempt, though.
Overall Frostbyte is a fairly reasonable platform type game which
is priced relatively cheaply, however I did find that after playing
it for a while it became a mite boring. This was because successive
screens do not necessarily increase steadily in difficulty. Some are
very easy and others are extremely hard. Difficult screens early on
may cause loss of lives, making later screens more of a problem as
you don't have spare lives to experiment with. Frostbyte should
appeal to arcade adventure fans, even if it doesn't break any new
ground in originality.
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