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HOVERFORCE HOVERFORCE by Accolade is a fast-paced action game, set in a near future, where mutant crimelords known as Alterants control the streets of MetaCity. The Alterants traffic in Aftershock, a mind-altering drug delivered by couriers accompanied by heavily-armed escorts. (This review is based on the IBM version.) As a genetically-engineered law officer, you must destroy the drug traffickers and stop the spread of the Aftershock drug, using an advanced hovercraft as your weapon. The game play is similar to other fast arcade or action games. You have a cockpit-level view from your hovercraft. You drive around blasting the Alterant's drug runners and bodyguards, picking up the colored objects they leave behind which give you scoring points or the means to upgrade your vehicle. MetaCity is a green plain with groups of large colored blocks representing buildings. Scattered street lights, shrubs, and lakes form additional obstacles to movement. The network of lakes adds an interesting challenge...you can cross them if you're quick, but spend more than a few seconds over water and your hovercraft will sink. The city is divided into four Quadrants and each one has a specific Alterant you must destroy. The Alterant's digitized photo is shown in the mission introduction screen. Your Enemy Disposition Display in the cockpit will show a short digitized photo sequence of the Alterant reacting with pleasure to hits on your ship, or going "oof" when you destroy one of his agents. These digitized sequences are brief but fun. Your main target for each mission is the Runner - a "Flash Gordon" styled red hovercraft which moves from one part of the city to another, making drug deliveries. While chasing the runner's hovercraft through the city you'll have to fend off or destroy his bodyguards and henchmen, shown as armed robots and saucer-shaped vehicles. The sky turns dark at the beginning of each drug run, and you then have a limited amount of time to find the Runner and blast him before he reaches his next drop point. Each mission consists of a time frame that includes several drug runs. At the end of that time, if you haven't destroyed the Runner, you have failed and must repeat the mission. If you destroy the Runner, you progress to the next mission. It takes three missions in each quadrant to destroy a given Alterant, so the game has a total of 12 levels. The difficulty increases as you move through the levels, with more dangerous henchmen and Alterants to deal with in the higher levels. Although the game runs in 256 color VGA, it uses a limited number of colors for most objects, giving it an "EGA-ish" look. The buildings are large rectangular blocks with no detail, but that does keep the frame rate high. Even stepping my machine down to 8Mhz the frame rate was very smooth. I was disappointed in the graphics used for the bodyguard objects. A majority are just simple flying saucer or robot shapes. They move around laterally and fire at you, but there's no additional animation. Sound is not a strong point in the game. With an Adlib or Soundblaster card you can choose either constant music or sound effects. The sound effects don't measure up to those of most other current games for the IBM. Bursts of white noise are used for weapons, and most sound effects had a excessive amount of hiss. The game play is hampered by the hovercraft movement. It can only spin on its vertical axis and move forward. It can't back up or move sideways, which makes movement around obstacles a chore. I had trouble getting a good feel for controlling the hovercraft with a joystick - it seemed oversensitive. I had better results using mouse or keyboard control. Stepping my 386/33Mhz machine down to 8Mhz improved the joystick control some, but I still had trouble overshooting the turns. Except for the joystick control problem, the game played fine at 33Mhz. You aim your selected weapon by rotating your craft from side to side. There is no elevation of the gun or missile systems so aiming is very easy. Available weapons are a machine gun for close range, a cannon for medium range, and missiles for long range. The game starts you out with just the machine gun. You must pick up cash dropped by Alterant henchmen in order to upgrade your weapons, buy more ammunition, or improve your hovercraft with better shields and engine capacity. Weapon Shop buildings are indicated on the cockpit map screen. An indicator arrow in the cockpit will also help you find the nearest shop. Trying to upgrade your vehicle is the most frustrating part of the game. Once you enter, you get a series of selection screens, but there isn't enough information on what's being offered for sale. On some screens cryptic objects are shown and there's just no way to know what they are or how they would improve your hovercraft. The manual is no help, it just tells you how to find Weapon Shops and has no list of upgrade options. Trial and error - actually buying something and trying it out - will eventually tell you what's what, but this information should have been in the manual or a help screen. As an action game, HOVERFORCE succeeds fairly well. The pace is very fast, and racing through the maze of buildings in pursuit of the Runner does get your adrenaline pumping. Compared to the rest of the game market it's only an average quality production. You can't help being influenced by other games you've seen, and after seeing Stellar 7 (another futuristic tank action game) I was disappointed in the overall game play and graphics in HOVERFORCE. HOVERFORCE is distributed on 5-1/4" 360K disks (3-1/2" available), and copy protection uses a combination of code wheel and keyword from the manual. Graphics support is for CGA, EGA, Tandy 16-color, and VGA/MCGA. HOVERFORCE requires 570K free memory, which is rather a lot. A section of the manual does a very good job of explaining how to modify your autoexec.bat and config.sys in order to get enough free memory to run the game. I found one major bug: Pausing the game would often cause a lockup, requiring a reboot. HOVERFORCE is published and distributed by Accolade.