It Came From The Desert (It Came From The Desert)

Name: wampyrii

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Product:	It Came From The Desert
Date:	01/09/01 (69 review reads)
Rating:

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It Came From The Desert is easily one of Cinemaware's greatest games. It pays homage to the 50s Sci-Fi genre, especially those which consisted of some kind of mutated monster and in particular THEM! from the mid-50s. Here you play a geologist investigating the recent landing of a meteor on the outskirts of the desert town of Lizard Breath. However, not only do you find the meteor but also a number of strange events are occurring including the disappearance of some towsfolk and the discovery of a headless cow out on some farmer's ranch. Intrigued you of course investigate only to find that there are huge mutant ants wandering around the desert now, mutated by the landing of the meteor. Your task in this game is to assemble enough evidence to prove to the mayor of the town that you are neither a madman nor is the situation one to be taken lightly whilst confronting both these ants and some hostile reactions from the townsfolk.

The first thing which strikes you about this game is the graphics. There are simply stunning for the Amiga and really capture the 1950's feel as well. Gameplay takes place in real time and the clock begins ticking as soon as you start with each second representing a second in normal time. When travelling larger distances which you have to do using the game map you are given an estimated time as to how long this would take and this is added to the clock. Time is of the essence here so you do not want to be wasting in. When you get into a fight and lose then you end up in the hospital with a rather large chested nurse hanging over the bottom of your bed(gotto worry about games developers) and the prospect of a two day wait before they will release you - or an escape attempt. Attempt to escape and you must sneak around the hospital without being caught, manage it and you are free, but get caught by a doctor or nurse and you are in for the duration.

Gameplay may at first seem rather limited by the menu driven style, bu
t there are literall hoardes of options that you can select so resultantly it was never completely linear and there were different routes which you could take to your final goal. But this is the adventure part and there is also a more aracde style game which runs in tandem to this whereby you can get involved in knife fights with unfriendly locals, shoot the ants with your pistol and infinite supply of grenade and even rce again the local petrol heads on the highway. All good stuff. Couple this with some rather spooky music and an elaboarte story if you try to follow it and not just run about blasting things and you should have a supremely enjoyable game.

You do not.

Well, its a good game but its difficult to actually really get into it when you spend every other second swapping a disk. This game comes on a lot of disks and every location seems to end up in you swapping one for another. I suppose that is the price you pay for the graphics you have here but even so! If it could have been installed onto a hard drive it would have been fine but no, they decided not to include this as an option...oh well. Hence, its good, it looks superb and is fun to play, but quickly becomes annoying thanks to the disk swapping.

Summary: