Waterworld

Waterworld is a conglomeration of three different game styles involving shooting, action and swimming. These game styles are integrated to bring Waterworld from the big screen to your home.

The end result isn't too exciting. Despite the three types of gameplay,

Waterworld gets repetitious. Another flaw lies with the graphics. While the backgrounds of the action stages are detailed, the rest of the game needs work. Of course there is nothing much to show in a world of water, but... another point that needs to be brought up is the character detail. There should be more. Your bullets are nothing more than white pixels. The control is loose, and it'll take time to learn how to control both your character and your ship. Try to learn how to flip your Trireme around quickly. It helps when you get swarmed by jet skis.

The cycle of levels starts out with you piloting your Trireme, a small but maneuverable boat. Enemy jet skis and boats will start attacking. The object is to clear them out. Aircraft will attack during the later levels, and sometimes you'll have to defend an atoll. That means the jet skis will start kidnapping people.

In the tradition of Defender, you will have to save them. The shooter levels are often broken up by underwater sequences. The Mariner (you) has a certain amount of strength, and you can only stay underwater so long. When the meter on the screen runs out, the stage is over. If you don't make it back to the surface, you lose the bonus. All sorts of aquatic critters try to hit you. Unfortunately, you don't have any attacks.

The action scenes take place within the atoll. You must find your way through the ramshackle city in search of the Smokers. Once you execute each and every one, you'll be treated to a shop sequence. Along the way you'll collect weapons from the bodies of those you've slain. These are far superior to the cheesey weapons you start out with. You will notice that unless you have a gun, you can't do a jump attack. This gets a bit frustrating.

The shops are important. It is here that you can repair your ship and buy weapons. The things you can purchase range from a Gatling gun to aquatic mines. The power-ups for the most part are useless, except for the Gatling gun, which chews up enemy boats like you wouldn't believe! There is also an Uzi that might prove to be helpful. It's best to use your money on Gatling guns and repairs. Everything else is a waste of money.

In terms of a game-to-movie translation, Waterworld isn't half bad. The music is very new age and very relaxing. It reflects the film well. The scenes couldn't have been closer. Cinemas might have helped keep things from becoming monotonous, while retaining the feel of the movie. If you enjoyed the movie, Waterworld might whet your appetite for adventure.

Top Tip Number One: if you're going to get lost, whatever you do. don't do it around the Kings Road where there are lots of weirdy people walking about eyeing you suspiciously because your hair isn't spiky and dyed 200 different colours.

Top Tip Number Two: if you do manage to get lost around said area, don't ask anyone for help because they'll either send you the wrong way or they'll think up a street name at random (complete with bogus directions), no doubt chuckling to themselves afterwards at their incredible sense of wit.

You may have guessed by now that I got completely, totally and utterly lost on my way to visit Intelligent Games. By the time I finally got there I had seen all of Chelsea (and some other bits of London, too) and I felt as though I'd walked about 100 miles (probably because I had). This was not the start to my adventure I'd hoped for, but thankfully, upon my eventual arrival, I was greeted by Intelligent Games' PR girl. Marven. Suitably sympathetic, she whisked me off for a goodly feast, where I took the opportunity of boring her silly with my tales of misadventure in darkest Chelsea She asked me if I felt up to taking a look at Waterworid, IG's new strategy game based on the already outrageously successful movie. As that was what I was there for, off we went.

From tiny acorns...

Having been under the mistaken impression that Intelligent Games was a small company with a handful of developers, I was more than a little surprised after being shown around its buildings. Not so! The offices are spread across two large houses, with several development teams beavering away on different projects. Walk into one office and you'll find programmers putting the finishing touches to Sim Isle. Walk into another and there's a different set of people working on Azrael's Tear. Further on, Beta testers are working on Ticonderoga, Intelligent Games' first release which is now being converted for Windows and Mac platforms.

Publishers who have already signed up the talents of the IG team so far are Mindscape, Interplay and simulation giants Maxis. It also has a game in development for Electronic Arts, although unfortunately it couldn't be more specific about the title or nature of it. It's quite astonishing - all this from a company who only arrived on the game scene in March this year.

So what's the secret of its success? According to the people at IG, the company's policy is to create games from the bottom up. This basically means that it concentrates on the gameplay first, making sure its products have real depth before moving onto the graphics and sound. It often develops playable prototypes at early design stages which can be shown to potential publishers, who can then see the game's depth and appeal right from the start.

IG's commitment to gameplay over gloss is immediately evident in Waterworld, which features real-time non-stop action right from the word go, while at the same time managing to contain hidden layers of depth which the player will come across the further he gets into the game.

The plot, of course, is spookily similar to the movie and places you in a futuristic environment where the polar icecaps have melted and literally turned Earth into 'Waterworld'. The remaining members of Earth's shattered populace now exist on floating towns called atolls. Their lot is a sorry one - a constant struggle of survival and an endless search for vital resources such as food, soil and drinkable water, all of which are naturally very scarce.

Smokers can be bad for your health

To make matters worse than they already are, a bizarre cult called the Smokers constantly attacks the inhabitants of the atolls, stealing their resources and generally just looking for an excuse to have a good ruck.

Your role in the game is that of an atoller (ie someone who lives on an atoll - good that, innit?). You start off with a meagre amount of men at your command and a limited amount of resources and your task is basically to make sure you always have enough food and so on, while beating up anyone you don't like the look of. The game is played from a top-down isometric viewpoint and increases in difficulty with every mission (you get less men and resources as you go on).

At first glance, Waterworld looks like a simple shoot 'em up in which your objective is to simply kill everything on each level to progress to the next. But after playing for a while you soon discover that the game also has strong strategic elements; you can increase your chances of success by researching better weapons and bartering to get supplies of goods you're running short of. This is the resource management side of the game, but you won't need to beginning - it becomes much more important when you've got into some of the later missions. Graphically, Waterworld is far superior to most other games of this type I've seen (and I've seen a lot of them!).

The sprite movement is very smooth and the backgrounds are well drawn and look very atmospheric. There's a very detailed svga mode (which is tops if you have a big monitor), or a vga mode, which I much preferred because the sprites are very large and realistic. Waterworld will also have a multi-player option, 25 minutes of video-linking missions using actors, props and actual sets from the film, and night-time missions which limit the players' immediate vision and increase the general atmosphere and tension.

Waterworld looks like another winner for Intelligent Games; we'll bring you a full review as soon as the finished product comes in - watch this space!

Based in the same waterlogged world as the most expensively mediocre film ever made. Waterworld the game is an isometric, top-down, squad-level shoot 'em up. As the War Chief, you must guide your handful of men over 21 missions in the hope of finding either resources, prisoners or both. Some missions will have you defending your own floating home from the various raiders who try to take you on. Controlling your troops is essentially the same as in Red Alert. You drag a box around them, assign control keys and send them off around the map. As you complete each mission you'll get to exchange resources for better weapons and armour, survivors will gain valuable experience, and you'll be able to watch specially shot footage featuring actors from the original film. Lucky you.

Die Toten Mosen

After 30 seconds, when you get to level two. you'll not only realise that the enemy lose their trousers when they die, but also how samey everything looks. Essentially, the developers have taken one scene from a hyped up. now tremendously out of date and mediocre film, and stretched it over 20-odd levels. Having to play on atolls doesn't make for many new and exciting twists in level design either. Everything is grey and flat, and consists mainly of platforms of varying thickness where you can walk and engage in combat. As well as being very similar, the levels lack any kind of atmosphere or inventiveness. The sea may lap the sides of the atoll, but there is no feel of how flimsy they are in the film. On the plus side, the soldiers are well animated, and the number of weapons and resources is adequate. But the range of bad guys is limited, and you can't help wishing that jet skis and mutant fishes would make an appearance to liven things up a little. This may not be completely in keeping with the movie plot, but that was two years ago. Once you've seen one bad guy going through the motions you've seen them all. If there was any advanced method in the bad guys' madness, I never noticed it. The AI isn't bad, but it isn't good either. A lot of the nasties will quite happily walk into a hail of bullets. While some may hold back, you soon grasp their IQ. If you keep your boys numerous and in the right places to pick up enough resources, it won't be long before you've played the game through without too much trouble. Rest assured, you'll never have to play it again.

Time to suck

This game was over two years in development, so you would've thought we'd be getting something special. Not so. Don't expect another Dungeon Keeper. This is essentially the same game Chris went to see back in 1995. If anything, it contains fewer features. It seems to me that the resource management side that was promised has been ditched, leaving only simplistic between-level trading. What really sucks big ostrich eggs are the 'time-to-rock' 'go-get-'em' voices from your men as you play. At first you laugh at them but after just a few minutes, you will want to strangle somebody.

Burning footage

While it doesn't deserve to burn to a crisp in hell, burning the soles of its feet with lighted cigarettes should prove a suitable punishment. It's almost as if the licence has held back any attempts on the developer's part to inject any depth or gameplay. Although there was plenty of scope in the storyline of the film to include more features, you can't help but feel that the programmers decided to cut their losses and get the game out The end result is rather like the film: enjoyable enough at the time, but instantly forgettable.