Fears captures just about everything that's good about computer gaming and absolutely everything that's great about the Amiga-scene in general. For it truly is a torchbearer, leader, inspiration and call-to-arms for legions of Amiga gamers, coders, artists and game publishers - past, present and future.

It pushes the standard A1200 to its limits. Take the following as an example of what Fears manages: real-time, full-screen texture mapping, optional dithering of the textures, resizing of the windows, use of the CD32 controller and that all-important 'shoot-your-friends' link-option.

So what? Who cares about technical innovations and tricks if they don't boost a game in the entertainment, longevity and value-for-money stakes? Happily, Fears is more than entertaining, offers 30 tough levels of monster-saturated mayhem and includes an editor to let the gamers create their own, completely individual custom levels.

The aim of Fears is simple. Explore an encapsulated dungeon/tower, wipe out any monsters found there, collect treasures and weapons, seek out secret doors, find the exit and then do the same thing over again, while accumulating a large score.

Fiendish layout
While maybe a bit too simplistic for the most demanding of gamers - a plot line with internal dynamics driving the action would have been excellent - I still found Fears to be lots of fun to play for many reasons.

The first of these concerned the design of the levels. Unlike Gloom, with its ground-floor-only policy and no-save option after completion of levels, the standard layout in Fears quickly becomes fiendish; whole floors can be elevated to other levels at the trip of a switch.

Some doors refuse to be opened by the standard method of bashing the spacebar, they have to be tripped from somewhere else on the level - a trip that's usually protected y all manner of nasties. Staircases make an appearance also. Every level's got at least one staircase and usually more.

Though completely and utterly welcome, in certain instances the staircases can lead to problems that quickly become infuriating. There's no option to look up or down, it's straight-ahead only. This means that on staircases which skirt the edges of rooms before descending into them, inhabitants can pick you off before you even get a chance to see who's firing at you, let alone return fire.

The only cue available is that of the incoming fire itself. Considering that seven or eight hits can more or less polish you off, it seems a tad unfair to use this particular mechanic to extend play-time. Even with a cheat-button that let me restore ammo and health to full whack, I still found it hard to make any headway on certain levels. Luckily, there are two difficulty settings to even things out.

It's the pits
While on the subject of aggressive frustration, though, one of the features of enormous contention is that of the lava pits. Fall into one of these and you die. Believe me when I say it's all too easy to take the plunge - a dreadful waste of life. Apparently, the lava pits were a point of hot debate between Manyx, the publisher, and Bomb, the creator of Fears.

The fact that falling into a pit subtracts from your health-points at an alarming rate should be penalty enough. There should be a way of escaping, whether it be by tripping a secret staircase, reaching an elevator, or whatever, but always, always, the player must have a chance to make amends for the mistake. Otherwise it feels like the game's being spiteful.

Now, if reading the past couple of paragraphs seems to reflect on the game badly, consider this. The dividing-line between love and hate is roughly a micro thick - according to romantic scientists that is. Fears I love. That's why I hate both of the above blemishes. But don't let them put you off the game.

Quick recap
In fact, it's worth having a quick recap on why Fears is so good. Firstly, it does what many said couldn't be done on the Amiga - it puts a hot-wired, joyriding, Mad Max-ethos, full-screen version of a Doom-clone into the hands of Amiga-owners.

Secondly, it plays famously and presents gamers with a tough, pupil-dilating, breath-exhaling, tension-mounting challenge, in terms of action, excitement and playability.

Thirdly, the level-editor takes the idea of interactivity literally and puts the power of the game into the hands of those who play it.

No doubt, someone will soon come up with their own monsters and textures as well. In other words, Fears will continue to evolve as an ongoing entity.

Finally, the engine driving Fears is constantly evolving. Bomb are true Amiga-enthusiasts and hope to exploit the power inherent in accelerated Amigas. So, if you haven't bought an accelerator yet, start saving. Fears is worth it.

In a head-to-head fight between Gloom and Fears, they'd either kill each other, or would have to settle for an honourable draw. Neither is yet quite strong enough to gain a firm upper hand, although Fears with its interactive, multi-level design-element does push it slightly ahead of Gloom.

Team 17's Alien Breed 3D had better watch out; it may just have been pre-emptied by the new blood in town, Manyx and Bomb. Fears should be a compulsory purchase on every gamer's list.

CUE TITLES: Fast-cutting establishing shots of 19th century Munich, Ironside-style music. Words drift lazily down to centre of screen as title: Beethoven - Badge 417. Words become pellucid as title sequence unfolds behind. Throughout, red crosshair target slides purposefully across screen, trying to draw a bead of Beethoven's head. Fast cuts: Beethoven skinning across bonnet of car, gun in hand; Beethoven in street, directing tourist with huge map, Beethoven pounding away on piano; Beethoven diving to catch dropped phial of deadly virus; Beethoven dancing furiously in strobe-lit nightclub;

Beethoven conducting 80-piece orchestra, turning to wink at girl in front row; Beethoven jumping for the skids of risking helicopter but missing and falling off a building; Beethoven squatting down to sign the manuscript of Fidelio for a little girl; Beethoven pulling himself out of a swimming pool fully-clothed, grinning ruefully. Crosshair settles over final pic and stylised bullet-holes spatter across the screen.

CAPTION: Lee Horsely is:
CAPTION: Beethoven - Badge 417.
CAPTION: Tonight's episode - Murder's Not For Amateurs.
(Streets of 19th century Munich, Burgermeister strides past, followed by Beethoven.)

BURGERMEISTER: Dammit, Beethoven, you know I can't do that.
BEETHOVEN: C'mon, Bill. You haven't a chance of solving this without me.
BURGERMEISTER: No, Beethoven. No. The last time you helped out, we had a convent blown up and 16 casualties - including my wife.
BEETHOVEN: Goddammit, Bill - he was my partner.

(Burgermeister stops suddenly.)
BURGERMEISTER (Stabbing with forefinger in emphasis): No way, Beethoven. We're all sorry about Spielz, but you're a loose cannon. You don't take orders. The department can't afford another media crucifixion. Beethove, you're off the case.

BEETHOVEN (freezingly): Sorry, Bill - but I don't hear you.
(He drives off in a fast car, tyres squealing.)
But anyway.

SAFER
Fears is a maddening game. On the one hand it's a stunning technical achievement, combining fast full-screen Doom clonage with stairways, lifts, rivers of acid, sinister lighting and near-sublimal sound to create a fantastically scary atmosphere; on the other it's hateful to a frightening degree. There was never a moment in the game when I was genuinely, freely enjoying myself, lost in it, believe in it, ducking when rocket shots roared over my head and bellowing a suitable movie quote as I won a tensely mismatched battle.

Not once. And that is clearly terribly, terribly wrong.
A heck of a lot of this wrongness is to do with the monsters and the way they 'handle'. You'll always be opening doors suddenly to receive fireballs in the face as, STRANGELY, the monsters have UNERRINGLY LUCKILY guessed when you're approaching.

A few goes furnish the answer: if they're close enough not to be concealed by the dark fringes of the screen (a spectacular beautiful effect, as the corridor before you fades into terrifying nothingness almost as if you're carrying a torch or something) the monsters know exactly where you are. You might not be able to see them - say, they're at the bottom of a flight of steps, or in the pit of a lift - but THEY KNOW WHERE YOU ARE. You'll never really be fighting just the one - even if that's the only one you can see - because others will be pouring fire into you as you writhe helplessly. And that's rubbish.

As is, indeed, the way the monsters rip bullets at you until dead. Slam rounds into the monsters in Gloom and they recoil wounded, their aim thrown and their senses scrambled for a few vital moments. In Fears, a monster will continue to fire, speedily and accurately, unconcerned by your retaliatory shots, up to their death. (Even, in fact, as their death animation plays, because until it's finished the game doesn't acknowledge them as dead. I'm not making this up).

And you can't plan to avoid them. A fatuous omission of such a sound-clever game is a 'wandering monster' noise, or a trumpet of joy as they spot you. (How hard could it have been to add even, say, a sound for the bullets missing you and flying by?) Thundering around the complex, the first you know of a monster is the thwup-thwup of its bullets making your screen go orange. You have no warning.

A third naughty thing is the way Fears cheats with height. There are indeed stairs and lifts, but the game sees everything as 'flat'. - if you fire directly at a monster you'll hit it, regardless of your respective vertical positions. (There is in fact a hierarchy to height; if there are monsters above and ahead, you'll automatically shoot at the lower ones first. Gee, thanks.)

It's a common cheat in Doom games (Gloom leaves well alone by not bothering with stairs to start with) and would be perfectly acceptable were it not for two things: the monsters KNOWING WHERE YOU ARE (remember, being atop a tottering ledge or, indeed, behind a wall is no obstacle to their seeing you) and the inescapable rivers of lava.. By all means, have drains full of killer acid swirling ominously about the base of the towering maze for the unwary player to plunge into, but GIVE THEM A CHANCE TO ESCAPE.

Fears, incredibly, has complicated, twisting tunnels of acid - sometimes containing extra ammo and tantalizing bonuses - but absolutely no way of getting back to dry land. Fall down and, no matter how excitingly fast you run, you will die. What's the reason for not having put in a lift, or a button to make a drawbridge come down? The game alienates you as you struggle through a level, fall off a ledge (sometimes through no fault of your own OF WHICH MORE LATER) and lose everything. And that's abominable. Especially as you you realise you can't see down a steep flight of steps.

Yes folks, at points in the game you're walking blind, painfully aware that a movement too far at the bend in the stairway will drop you straight in the lava. (and there's no 'give' at all in corners: while you might reasonably expect to get away with cutting slightly across the diagonal, Fears gives no quarer: down you go.)

There's even, God forgive them, a bit where you see a staircase to a button that is, in fact, concealing a gap. What the hell's going on?

FARES
This is what I think is going on: the playtesters are too close to the game. They are, I'll hazard, the programmers. It doesn't matter to them that the monsters' bullets are so fast you have little to no chance to avoid them by sidestepping. Nor do they think much of the extensive ledge-based action which utterly negates the sidestep: use it, and you fall off.

Nor, indeed, of the boggling width of your 'body' (it appeared that every shot to hit the screen counted as hitting me, with no accounting for the bullets actually having whizzed safely past on one side). They've been playing Fears for ages, you see, and they're used to it.

Well, chums, I played Fears for ages, and at no point did I become used to it. At all times I was horribly aware it was a computer game, and that I couldn't, for example, rush thrillingly through the level because I'd just fall off something and die, or get caught in a six-way crossfire and die, or step upon what I took to be another stair and fall through and die.

Minor faults, like the non-real-time map (you should always, always in this kind of game be able to run around using the map because the levels are so fiendishly complicated - and Fears' are phenomenally fiendish) blew up to catastrophic proportions.

A promise to myself not to use the cheat mode until I'd completely, utterly played it out fairly collapsed around level five (there are thirty) and I pottered among the rest of the game finding out it was dismaying similar throughout: rooms with lots of doors, monsters immediately behind the doors, ledges to other rooms and lots of falling. Oh, and what's the point of having as a fun-packed hidden weapon a circular saw if every monster acts in exactly the same way and shoots you from a distance? Let's stop and do some good stuff.

FSAER
There's a tremendous level editor in Fears that's dead easy to use (everything's based on coloured squares) and fun to play around with. This is decidedly a Good Thing, and beefs up the longevity of the game. A pity you can't alter the way the monsters 'think', but there you go.

There's a (serial link only) 'deatmatch' game in there, but even though it's a huge step beyond Gloom's, - different weapons instead of balls of light - thre's still no feeling of terror at stumbling across your better-armed opponent because whatever he's carrying, he looks the same.

Also, there's no feeling you're someone: no blobs of blood blasting off them, or ricochets or anything - fault, indeed, of the game proper. There is, in short, no visceral (erk) 'vavoom!' to the game. (So much, then, for a selection of Good Thing).

Fears is enormously more clever than Gloom, but I undoubtedly prefer the latter game for IT IS FUN! Fears, to my mind, fails on all levels but the aesthetic; it's hopelessly unfair as a zap game (you never look forward to a fight) and ludicrously uphill as an exploration game (if you don't fall to your death you'll be baffled by the alikeness of the walls and fiddly map and go in circles for ages).

I grew from smirking fraternally at its faults to hating having to load it up and play. By all means slather over this proper Doom - but on the Amiga, ignore me completely and add 50 or 60 per cent to the score, but you will, of course, be wrong.