Game Review: Quadrax

Game Review: QUADRAX

• Source: SINTECH
• Price: DM 10,- / öS 70,-
• Producer: Ultrasoft (Slovenia)

The Sun Temple of Quadrax is arguably the most mysterious place on our planet. Rumors say that the Sun God resides on the top floor of this temple, and whoever reaches him will be rewarded with eternal life. The whole thing has just one minor catch: so far, no one has managed to survive even the first floors of the temple.

That was the sugarcoated story of Quadrax; now let's get to the actual game review:

For the Spectrum 48/128, this is arguably the most thrilling action/puzzle game in a long time. The goal is to reach the exit of each room with both characters. Yes, you read that right: with both! You don't control just one character, but two alternatingly — or, if playing with two players, each player can take control of one character. The second character is absolutely essential, because without them, nobody would be there to operate the switches for the elevators, etc.

Doesn't sound particularly hard, does it? But believe me, only the first rooms are easy; with each level, the difficulty increases significantly. Quite unusual for the genre is the ingenious idea that you don't necessarily need all elevators, teleporters, removable blocks, or boulders to complete a level. Because of this, you often fall into the trap of thinking a boulder must be moved, only to realize in horror later that you've blocked your own path!

All kinds of obstacles stand in our way, the worst of which are probably the crumbling floors and ceilings that dissolve, blocking the path for the second character — truly MEAN! But with a bit of common sense and intelligence, every room can be solved. Fortunately, if you make a mistake, you can restart the room an infinite number of times, resetting it to its original state. If a boulder falls on your head or you drop from too great a height, your character dies and the level restarts. By the way, the death animations, just like everything else, are very nicely and fluidly animated — almost as good as in Prince of Persia, though the sprites in Quadrax are much smaller. At first, it's actually fun watching a character get crushed. By the way: if one character dies, it's game over for the other one as well.

Worth mentioning in this context is the password option — a great relief so you don't have to start from scratch every time after reloading. All passwords consist of five letters and form meaningful words, making them easy to remember.

There is no sound apart from a few effects (e.g., footsteps); the 128K sound chip remains unused, even though it certainly would have added to the fun.

As I mentioned, the animations are truly realistic and astonishing. The rest of the graphics, especially the title screen, are very colorful and wonderfully drawn. I can recommend this game to anyone who doesn't mind loading it from tape. To put your mind at ease: all files are compressed, so loading doesn't take too long.

Now we come to the negative points I noticed:

+2A users with the standard ROM are out of luck! The game crashes after loading. Those who, like me, have a +D permanently attached to their Spectrum (this applies to other disk interfaces as well) are also left out in the cold: the oh-so-brilliant BusySoft wrote a loader that crashes on most disk interfaces, presumably to prevent snapshots. You can't even grab screens. This annoyed me so much that I didn't rest until I finally cracked the game; now it runs from +D disk again. Next time I meet BusySoft, I'll tell him what he can do with his loader!

The files are saved at standard speed (1500 baud), but if you try to copy them with a standard copy program, it won't work, because the program detects an illegal copy before the main files are even loaded.

The copy protection might be useful for Ultrasoft, but for disk users and +2A owners, it is an utter nuisance.

Tip for Disciple users: Press the Inhibit button and enter OUT 31,0 — then you can load the game and make snapshots!

So, now that I have listed all the pros and cons, let's move on to the final verdict. That damn copy protection won't affect it, since the programmer of Quadrax isn't to blame for BusySoft's crimes:

• Graphics: 10
• Sound: 1 (Beeper only)
• Technical execution: 9
• Gameplay: 9

I would, of course, be very interested to hear other opinions on this topic!

— Tiger's Claw