Producer: Mastertronic
Retail Price: £1.99
Author: Xcel
Captain Burt has only 7 seconds in which to save the world. How will he do it? Slowly the captain swivels his chair around and stares at you coolly. 'Don't worry,' he says in a macho voice, 'I have a plan…'
Poor old Burt is in a right pickle. A space freighter is out of control and determined to blow up. This in itself is quite an alarming prospect, but to add to the dilemma, if the freighter does go K A P O W then poor old Captain Burt will be stranded on a horrid asteroid and will never get back to Mother Earth. Not ever.
What a terrible position to be in! But there's more. The space freighter is up in space and Burt is stuck on the asteroid. His only means of transport is a rather decrepit shuttle which just so happens to be broken. Contending with a pressing time limit, Burt must repair the shuttle, zoom off to a neighbouring planet, collect the spare parts for the ailing freighter and mend same before it explodes. Gasp! And all in seven seconds. As we said before, how will he do it?
The spare parts to mend the shuttle are scattered all over the asteroid and must be collected in order to get the shuttle back on the road, to mix a metaphor. This should be an easy task but most of the vital pieces of the shuttle are possessively guarded by various alien horrors and contact with them results in Burt's valuable air supply being sapped away. At the start there are four air bottles, but these are used up pretty quickly as he hurtles around the space rock. However, to make sure Burt has something useful to inhale; new air bottles can be picked up along the way. Oxygen status is displayed at the top of the main screen. When the chart reaches the red section on the fourth bottle you know it's going to be curtains for Burt very shortly.
Not all the objects on the asteroid are helpful and often you don't know this until they are safely tucked up in Burt's space suit pockets. Some are lethal such as the lump of Plutonium; some simply uncomfortable like the rough glass. Objects are picked up and stored by using the defined cursor keys and with nine pockets nine objects can be carried at one time. Objects can also be dropped and used when required and to know what's carried, a key press reveals the Inventory.
To move around, Burt is equipped with a jet pack that can propel him to great heights or carry him over large chasms. The asteroid consists of a series of underground caverns, as well as the knobbly surface which hides many surprises and many dangers. Watch Captain Burt as he battles to save the world (and himself of course!) in all of seven seconds. Gee, what a hero!
COMMENTS
Control keys: redefinable
Joystick: Kempston, Cursor, Interface 2
Keyboard play: great, very responsive
Use of colour: excellent
Graphics: very nice characters and good backdrops
Sound: nothing revolutionary
Skill levels: one
Screens: 128
I was pleasantly surprised with Universal Hero. I found it very easy to get into and exciting to play. All the characters are extremely well detailed, with a great drawing of a Spectrum Plus in the Computer Room. The game revolves around putting items together and then using them to get other items, and is consequently very addictive, involving as it does the need for a quick mind as well as accurate moving. The 'feel' of the way that Burt moves around is excellent, but rather annoying when you actually bounce off ceilings and do not hover properly. Universal Hero is surprisingly smooth in its movement and is completely flicker free. A mass of Spellbound problems in a very complex game. Well worth the meagre two quid.
Molecule Man was a very good game, excellent at the price. Looking at Universal Hero, I begin to ask myself, have MASTERTRONIC turned over a new leaf? This game is good, not mega hyper ultra brill, but good, and excellent value for money. The puzzles are maybe a little simple, but the game plays well, and has addictiveness that more than justifies its meagre price. This is well worth buying, even if only because you won't have to save up for it.
It's been a long time since I've seen cheap software as fun to play and as compelling as this. It plays in a similar way to many other problem solving games although the problems, initially simple, get very hard towards the end. Graphically this one rates quite highly as the backgrounds are very nicely detailed and the large and porky characters whizz around well. Colour, too, is used to maximum effect without any attribute clash. The sound would have been greatly improved if there was a tune on the title screen, but there are some spot effects which are reasonable. Universal Hero certainly offers great value for money, so I recommend it.
Mastertronic
£1.99
I wonder if Ultimate knew what it was starting when it released Jetman. It must be one of the most copied games around. Universal Hero follows firmly in it footsteps. Which is not to say that it's not a good game; it's just that if you're looking for originality, then look elsewhere.
Your task is to locate various parts of your shuttle craft so that you can journey to another planet to pick up spares for a runaway space freighter. Failure will leave you with a very long walk home.
You start on a small asteroid with both surface and subterranean locations to explore. And, of course, it goes without saying (though that won't stop me saying it) that most of the locations contain the obligatory nasties who'll drain your limited air supply if they touch you. The objects you find in the caverns can be picked up and stored in one of the nine available storage spaces. By moving a cursor, you can select any of the objects you're carrying and either use or drop them. For the most part the problems are of the standard 'find the use for the object' type. Nothing terribly exciting there!
And that's about it. Average. Could try harder.
Label: Mastertronic
Author: Xcel
Price: £1.99
Joystick: various
Memory: 48K/128K
Reviewer: Graham Taylor
It's getting very difficult to find exciting new ways of describing games which essentially repeat the same formula over and over again.
I mean, how can you disguise the fact that Universal Hero has approximately the same plot as Spellbound and all those countless other Mastertronic titles where you move your man around, collecting objects, some of which are useful for solving puzzles, opening doorways etc, whilst looking for spare parts to repair your shuttle which will otherwise not be able to repair a space freighter which is out of control and... (cont page 211).
Anyway, it's bounce, collect, select, and use time again, but as such things go Universal Hero is considerably better than most of the competition. For one thing the graphics are large and don't flicker - you don't even notice attribute problems overmuch. For another, I managed to solve a couple of the puzzles within an hour which always cheers me up.
Universal Hero is a kind of Jetman figure and his jumps are controlled by jetpack so they have that slow motion look. There is an interesting mix of landscapes - a few tedious all-purpose caverns admittedly but also some detailed surface areas and control rooms.
You may carry nine items and you will find many more, what is and isn't useful is by no means readily apparent. In addition, sometimes it seems that a combination of objects is required to clear an obstacle. For example, one route was blocked by a fall of rocks, using the dynamite alone was pretty much a damp squid but if I was carrying the plunger as well...
Time limits are mandatory on games such as this. In this case your air is running out - if it should run out completely you get the exasperating advice, 'perhaps you should have filled up somewhere'. I know that.
Universal Hero is quite clever, I especially liked the fact that some problems can be solved by performing a specific action in another location many screens away - it'll take some thought but so far none of the puzzles I've discovered has actually been unfair (not so some other games where picking up some onions and dropping them on a frog opens the security door...)
In any event. Universal Hero once again poses the classic Mastertronic reviewing problem - it costs £1.99 - that's very, very cheap. The game is self evidently good value, and in that sense difficult to sensibly criticise. Nevertheless even taking other Mastertronic arcade adventures as a point of comparison, it's still recommended.
Mastertronic
£1.99
'A totally nail-biting, multidimensional, hi-resolution Awesome Arcade Adventure!' And all that for just £1.99. Actually, Universal Hero isn't quite as wonderful as the tongue-in-cheek hype suggests, but it's still pretty nifty for a piece of budget software.
It seems that our Hero has just got seven seconds to save his planet, and in those seven seconds he's got to wander through a set of caverns and find the spare parts needed to repair his space shuttle, which will fly him to another planet where he has to collect the equipment needed to repair the out of control space freighter so that he can get back to earth in one piece.
Universal Hero is, as you might have guessed, a wander-round-the-caves-collect-the-objects-and-avoid-the-monsters type game, and though it's a little old fashioned it is a highly polished and well designed example of the genre. And there's also a certain element of strategy thrown in as well, since some of the items that you have to locate can only be reached by solving puzzles. For instance, there is one cave entrance blocked by a pile of rubble and you've got to work out which objects can be used to start a rock slide and open up the entrance. Hero can carry up to nine objects in his pockets, so there's scope for some quite complex combinations of objects to be used.
As he makes his way through the game Hero uses up oxygen from four cylinders and collision with some of the nasties in the caves drains his air supply, so you've also got to go looking for spare oxygen supplies to keep you going. For some reason there are one or two monsters that just wipe out your entire supply in one go without any warning, and there's a lump of plutonium that has the same effect although again there's no warning that the object is actually plutonium. These things are a bit irritating as they make the game dependent on luck at some points, but once you've come across these traps once you can generally avoid them in future.
On the plus side there are some nice graphics and smooth animation, and the figure of Hero has a jaunty little walk as he strides through the caves. Thankfully there is a define keys option, but it would have been a good idea if the cassette inlay had given a bit more information about the game.
Universal Hero isn't a flawless game, but it does have its good points, and, as always, Mastertronic are still giving more expensive games a run for their money.
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