LOGOTRON was reknowned for little in the gaming field except for Xor, a strategic 2D maze game. Suddenly, after the excellent Star Ray, the company has hit the Amiga scene with a bang. The next release is Quadralien, a sci-fi puzzle game with shooting, back in the Xor tradition.
As well as a reactor heading for meltdown the luckless player has to contend with an invasion of aliens, a rogue computer, and a whole host of fiendish puzzles. The reactor, known as Astra, has three levels comprised of six chambers and the reactor core.
The complex part of this game comes in the form of slave droids which either repel or attract, just like magnets, and supposedly control the plant's day-to-
The primary aim is to avoid a meltdown by preventing the core temperature from getting too high, or the operations energy from sinking too low. Plus finding and destroying the Quadralien Mother.
To reduce the plant's temperature you must manoeuvre one of your droids so that it sends water barrels down chutes, or reduce the entropy level which is a measure of the movement of the DyMSEC. Tortuous or what? You control two from an initial selection of six droids as they run around the various mazes, shooting obstructing objects and absorbing others.
Each droid has its own special characteristics, from using a headlight to illuminate a darkened chamber to brute strength when shoving objects out of the way. The correct choice of droid depends on which environment you are confronted with.
What makes the game interesting, or stupefyingly dull depending on your point of view, is the way the various objects on screen interact with each other. So in order to create a certain effect or reach a certain place it is first necessary to work out where everything is going to end up.
There are loads of different types of objects, plenty of options for making the game more playable, such as code words to bypass the lower levels once completed, and a number of ways in which it can be tackled.
David Whittaker's music is pleasant enough, but the crude flip screen scrolling is irritating, and although the graphics are serviceable, Quadralien isn't pushing frontiers back in any department. I found it all a little tiresome.