Well, this game certainly had me screaming "Aaaaaaaaaaaargh!" at the top of my voice I can tell you. After the brill shoot 'em up fun of Silkworm this latest release from the Virgin/Mastertronic stable just doesn't measure up.
    Converted from the 16 bitties, Aargh! could loosely be described as a kind of arcade adventure style beat 'em up. It could also be described as a lot of other things - most of them unprintable.
    Aargh! is a one or two player affair in which you can take the part of either an ogre with halitosis or an 18 foot dragon. Both the characters are mean muthers who pack a solid punch and breathe fire (they're hot stuff for sure!). And the happy couple spend most of their time terrorising the townspeople of Darance Island in their search for - eggs! Yes, yes, I know it sounds strange, but eggs are the monster's plate de jour, and if they can collect a little clutch of five, then they can go for the biggie - the golden egg that lies under the volcano.
    To get these five eggs though, they must search through the 12 cities on the island, which range in architectural elegance from a primitive village of straw huts and wild west fort to a Chinese pagoda and Indian temple. They rampage through the cities, either beating up or blow-torching everything in sight, demolishing the buildings, eating the hamburgers and looking for the eggs. Once they've found one, it's on to the next city and so on.
    It all sounds well and good so far doesn't it, Spec-chums? I mean, rampaging monsters are what our Speccies were made for isn't it? Well yes, but not when the rampaging monsters are limited to one basic task - knocking down buildings to see what's hidden inside them. And not when each level consists of only one screen on which there are about five things which need to be knocked down. And especially not when the monsters only have one life which is constantly being drained each time they're hit. When they do die you have to rewind the tape and load in that level again. 'Cos Aargh! is a multi-load I'm afraid folks, which hardly seems necessary since it only loads one screen at a time. It's this and the other features I've just mentioned which unfortunately make what could have been a game you might have persevered with totally unplayable. Aargh! might just have measured up in the budget market, but as a full price release its name speaks for itself.

Ratings given by other magazines

2/10      4/10    Crash Review ---

Info supplied by the SPOT*ON database

YS Cross-references
		Aaargh!/Melbourne House	YS41	NEWS
Some info from Sinclair Infoseek+SPOT*ON