Atomik

Copyright : France Image Logiciel | Reviewed by : Malc Jennings

Atomic was written by Fraggle & Duck in 1992 and is possible one of the final puzzle games to be made available on the Amstrad CPC. The idea of the game is pretty simple but as you might have guessed slightly harder than your average Tetris game, worth playing with? find out below or download it via TACGR and see for yourself.

Graphics

Graphically, for the CPC at least, Atomik is one of the worst Breakout or Arkanoid clones ever to hit this wonderful machine. Blocks look awful with only 2 or 3 colours on screen at any one time, there are no computer controlled enemies to make the game that little more exciting, no power-ups to collect after smashing blocks (though you can shoot for all the good it does you) it?s slow and buggy as hell plus the level design leaves a hell of a lot to be desired. If you took this game to another platform like the ZX Spectrum or Atari 2600 then perhaps you would be on a winner but we have got to say this is one game that should never have been made on the CPC.

Sound

Sound is much the same thing, a few bleeps here and there with a strange rebound noise that changes pitch every 10 hits or so. Imagine grabbing a ruler and flicking it off the edge of the desk (we all did that at school right?) and that?s the kind of sound you?re in for in this game. Nothing compared to the excellence of Arkanoid and almost an insult to the good name of Breakout.

Gameplay

Gameplay is as you expect from the above, awful. If you have played either Breakout or Arkanoid before this title then you?ll be very upset to see the game being treated like this, sure it?s by a software house that not many people know anything about but just about every developer could pull a better game out of there arse than this.
Because the game looks nasty and it plays incredibly slow on even a 6128 machine it?s not really worth playing for longer than a few minutes, you?ll also notice major problems in the collision detection, problems with sprites displaying correctly and much more. There are worse games than this and even games that crash straight back to BASIC but we all know that the Breakout/Akanoid genre cannot be that hard to pull off so releasing a title in this state is just very bad indeed.