Army Moves logo

Imagine
Price: £14.95

After having played Army Moves for some considerable time today, I've come to the conclusion that it isn't a very enjoyable game to play. In fact it's about as much fun as standing next to a fat, sweaty man in a crowded tube train on the way home from Farringdon.

The game's fantastically vague scenario has you as an elite soldier whose mission is to... well, cause as much damage to the enemy's secret fortress as possible. The game has three sections. Stage one has you in a bouncy little jeep that has to get from one side of an iron bridge to another. The commander of the enemy forces is a bit miffed about you riding your jeep all over his lovely clean bridge and promptly sends out a fleet of armoured trucks and helicopter to blow you away.

Being a shrewd young soldier, you remembered to pack a missile launcher into the back of your jeep before you set out and so a quick jab on the fire button will send a volley of three missiles zooming from your jeep. Your jeep, thanks to its ultra bouncing tyres and mysterious disappearing wheelarches, has the nifty ability to bounce into the air, thus avoiding the missiles that the choppers lob at you. The bounce also comes in useful when traversing parts of the bridge that have been shot away.

Should you manage to complete the first section you can proceed to the second where you park your jeep and leap into a helicopter, which now has to fly from right to left. Again you have two types of weaponry, the standard front facing missiles and bomb-things that you can drop on hostile missile installations that fire their own brand of death back at you.

The installations aren't too accurate in their firing though, and the real threat comes from enemy planes. This is probably the most difficult game section of the lot and is so mind-meltingly tough that you're more likely to end up in an asylum of some sort or another than in the final section of the game...

After leaving your chopper, you have to complete the last section on foot which means jumping over quicksand, dodging grenades, running through swamps and into the not-so-humble abode of El Presidente himself. This is all pretty run of the mill hopscotch stuff.

Mutant birds flap down on you and rip your eyes out with their beaks. Firing your gun will only frighten them away.

Army Moves is not a great deal of fun. The three sections are all pretty poor both aesthetically and in terms of gameplay. Each one is tougher than the last, which is really saying something considering that section one is more difficult than the end sections of many other games.

The whole feel of all three sections is wrong and totally fails to convey any sense of action or excitement. The game's single saving grace is the refreshingly camp attitude. A laughably bad (but fun) rendition of 'Colonel Bogie' plays throughout the entire proceedings and there are a couple of nice presentation touches such as the way that the title of the game is spelt out in animated pockmarks left by bulletholes and the hi-score table lists the top 'Prime Movers' (must have been done by a Zodiac Mindwarp fan). This, however, does little to compensate for what is ultimately a terminally boring game.



Army Moves logo

Imagine, £24.95 disk

Your careers officer in school really had a hard time finding you a job. Just saying 'I wanna be an 'ard man!' wasn't exactly helpful. Still, now you're in the Special Operations Corps (SOC), you've been sent on a well dangerous mission to steal information from the enemy.

You must fight your way over a bridge in your jeep, through air defences in your helicopter and finally, on foot into the headquarters themselves proclaiming yourself a hero! OK, OK and a 'well 'ard geezer' if that's what you want...


Maff Evans I must admit I've never seen the arcade game, so I can't comment on whether this is an accurate conversion or not, but if its is faithful to the coin-op original, then I can safely say that it wouldn't get any of my ten pees pushed into it! Army Moves just doesn't utilise any of the Amiga's power to create fantastic graphics and realistic sound. They'd be passable on the humble 64, but on the Amiga they're nothing short of pathetic. The action is fiercely difficult and the only way to get through level one is by repeatedly shooting, jumping and backing off - not the most engrossing gameplay ever. If you like your Amiga, then don't make it suffer by loading this into it.
Paul Glancey Good grief! Come on Imagine, I thought the Amiga games market had passed through the 'Never Mind The Game, Look At The Graphics' phase! The level of gameplay in Army Moves is so minimal that it annoys me to think that people may have paid out big bucks just so that they can practise holding down the fire button and religiously going through two joystick movement patterns. The slightest deviation from the stringent stick manoeuvring results in instant death, and return a trip to the start of the level! So if, after ten minutes' play, you haven't vengefully put the disk under the grill and watched it bubble its way into oblivion, you'll be slumped over your joystick dreaming of happier times. I regret the loss to the world's natural resources caused by the production of this utterly awful 'game'.