Published 1985 by Firebird Software Ltd. | Author: Geoff Foley | [WOS]
“Cylu the Otsan, the chosen one of the people, enters the land of Evol to participate in the final challenge.”
You kids have it easy these days with your digital distribution and your day one patches and what have you. When games came on cassettes, “R Tape Loading Error, 0:1” was an accepted part of life, meaning a tiny screwdriver for adjusting your cassette player’s read head was an essential part of the Spectrum owner’s toolkit. My copy of Cylu was particularly troublesome, requiring a tweak of the screw seemingly every time I tried to load it – which I thought may have been why I was fairly ill-disposed towards the game at the time.
Revisiting it now, it proves to be a well-presented arcade adventure with a heroic fantasy plot that has little bearing on the actual gameplay. The player guides the robotic protagonist through a vast isometric maze, collecting items and depositing them in a central computer. Parts of the maze are blocked by forcefields which need to be disabled by collecting and depositing silicon chips. Time is limited by your fuel supply which depletes alarmingly quickly, requiring regular top-ups from canisters that are, more often than not, frustratingly out of reach.
In fact, frustration is still very much in order, despite playing from a reliable Z80 snapshot file. The game suffers from a tank-style control system which makes basic movement a pain and any progress is impossible without first mapping the locations of the sparse fuel canisters. Ultimately, there isn’t enough fun in this dull clone of the superior Alien 8 to make the slog worthwhile. Screw the Otsan – banishment to far side of the universe can’t be all that bad.
