Reviews

Unique and brilliant, although a little lacking in gameplay. What I like most about ECO is this fact that it gives us the chance to experience an insect's perspective of the world which is so unlike anything I've seen in any other game, and I really enjoy ECO for its originality and ability to open the mind. In fact, if I added up all of the hours I've spent crawling around these lands as a bug, it is probably longer than most real bugs live!
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This time we're going waaaay back ... 1986 ... Just remember ... This was the year when we were all singing 'Rock Me Amadeus Ro-ro-rock me Amadeus' on our way home from school. In the summertime, Johnny 5 needed input, and just before Ferris Bueller had his day off, the Bangles got us all prancing around like Egyptians. It was the greatest of years in the UK, but the ST only had one tos. After our stalwart adventure through the nefarious Lands Of Havoc, Microdeal churned out a more conservative offering with a plain and intelligible collection of five card games, namely Blackjack, Cribbage, Klondike, Poker Squares, and Solitare.
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So what are we looking at here? XOR is a tile puzzle, built within a labyrinthine area. The player must take control of two shield shaped tiles, and by sliding them around he must successfully cross all of the blue mask tiles in the labyrinth before proceeding to the exit door. To hinder movement, there are a variety of other tiles which can have the effect of blocking off passages or masks, or can sometimes help to create new passages in the case of explosives. The graphics for these tiles depict artefacts bearing a similar quality, for example: In level one there are wavy lines and spotted tiles which can only be traversed horizontally or vertically, like moving (across) land and submerging (down) in water. In later levels, you can find birds which fly horizontally, bombs which fall vertically, and magnets, dolls and teleports are all introduced, and many other things besides.
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The enjoyment factor is reasonably good, but feels unnecessarily subdued to me. Erik reminds me a little of the Spectrum adventure game King's Keep. If it were not for all the sprites bounding around, Erik would feel a little like an adventure game. Appropriate background music would have improved the arcade feeling no end, and added much needed atmosphere to the four different worlds. It would also have broken up the all or nothing feel.
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That's just it, though... Driller feels like a big technology demo. Much of the excitement came from wandering around and looking at things from every possible angle - approaching a tower and looking up to get that great feeling of height. This was all new stuff in 1988, but is standard fare today, as it was later in the STs life, too. When you take away the novelty, there isn't a whole lot of game left underneath.
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