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Your are the last fighter pilot left to defend the planet against an unknown enemy. Sounds familiar? Well it is, but for 10 quid you are not going to get the complete works of Shakespeare, and they would not be half as entertaining.

You have four lives to complete 10 missions to seek and destroy enemy targets. At the start of each mission, co-ordinates reveal the location of the targets, and then the fun starts. Controlling your aircraft is as tricky as trying to fry an eel while it is alive. But once mastered, you can become as acrobatic as Tony Curtis and Charlton Heston in Trapeze.

Hyperion has simple 3D polygon graphics, but the gameplay makes up for that, because it is difficult to handle, especially when you get to later missions. A good game at a realistic price, it would not cause embarrassment in an enthusiastic game player's collection.


Hyperion logo

In unserem Spartheater gibt es heute eine ganz spezielle Ausführung: fünf Games von Kompart (Hyperion, Mega Motion, Summer Camp, Winter Camp, & a rerelease of Creatures), vier davon sind trotz des allgemeinen Preises von nur 29 Märkern echte Neuerscheinungen! Da mußten wir natürlich ausnahmsweise auch hier zur Bewertung schreiten...

Im Stil des 3D-Ballerklassikers "Virus" darf hier ein aus Polygonen bestehendes Raumschiff über eine leicht ruckelnde Planetenoberfläche manövriert werden, um in insgesamt zehn Missionen alle Feindstellungen zu eliminieren.

Das Spielprinzip ist also schon etwas älter, ebenso betagt erscheint auch die Präsentation, und die Maussteuerung ist zudem relativ kompliziert ausgefallen. Wer solche Games liebt, wird Hyperion zwar trotzdem mögen, aber mehr als 52 Prozent waren beim besten Willen nicht drin. (mic)


Hyperion logo

Remember Virus? It had a few reviewers scrabbling around for superlatives when it was first released. The same game engine was then used for Conqueror. I didn't like it then; and time has not mellowed my judgement. It used some very clever 3D routines and looked extremely good, but was truly horrific to control. Hyperion is Virus without all the frilly bits, the resemblance is uncanny.

It looks reasonable enough, moves fast and has some nice crashing explosions, but it's little more than a collection or ingenious 3D routines roughly formed into a game. There are 10 missions featuring various bits of hardware to destroy and you have four lives to do it with. No passwords or anything, play till you die then back to mission one. There is little more than the 3D game itself and a few screens of text.

Your ship is a mouse-controlled nightmare to fly. A little note to the programmers: it really helps if one end of the spaceship is significantly different from the other, it makes it so much easier to tell which way you're going. There's an invaluable little radar map in the bottom right corner. Fly towards the dots with a reasonable grip on the craft's trajectory, come within firing range, then lose it completely, circle eccentrically trying to bring your guns to bear and crash into the ground or catch a missile full in the face.

With practice control comes and you start to land some shots on the enemy. The game starts to become fun, but it's too much like hard work.