With a barely concealed snigger, Matt Bielby takes a gander at the game that so succinctly sums up his feelings for the departed Ciaran Brennan, H.A.T.E. (har, har) (Oo-er, is this a breach of something-or-other?)
    Grrr... Despite the name, H.A.T.E. isn't a particularly vicious sort of game - by shoot'em up standards anyway. It stands for Hostile All-Terrain Encounter- smart, eh? - and takes place along a sharply undulating roadway suspended in space. It's fast, smooth and extremely playable, and there's not a blood or a gut to be seen. It's the biz, and there are two special levels of it - amongst other things - currently pulling the cover off your magazine. It's also got this month's worst name for coming up with any patent YS puns or jokettes about. Oh well, never mind.
    The plot is pretty simple, which to those in the know means we couldn't really find one. The game scrolls diagonally across the screen away from you, and you control either a plane or a tank basically blasting whatever you find in your path. These consist of either waves of hostile aliens or static domes, the latter being, apparently, nuclear power stations (gulp!) Now with even my rudimentary knowledge of things nuclear, I would assume the idea is to stay as far away from these things as possible, but 'tis not so! Instead, H.A.T.E. asks you to blast these muthas to pieces, (which sounds a touch ill-advised), and then drive/fly over the remains to pick up the radioactive core (!) which promptly attaches itself to your bottie and trails behind you. Yikes! Sounds a touch suicidal to moi!
    Still, this slight logic lapse allowed, H.A.T.E. plays pretty well. Graphics are nice and clear, and the thing scrolls smoothly. On the odd levels (one, three) you fly a plane which takes off from a runway. It then flies along the length of the road/airstrip thing. Your craft has a limited up and downward movement - needed to swoop down to recover waiting cores or to rise up and avoid low flying hostiles - and a left to right movement limited by the edges of the roadway. You have a single gun in this form, but should you be driving the tank you substitute the lack of flight ('cos as any 'fule' knows, tanks don't fly) with a second weapon. This is a grenade thingy that you can lob in an arc - needed because some of the power stations are hidden behind dips and bumps in the road.
    Aliens come in various types and formations, some flying towards you in patterns from out of holes in the ground, while others act more like floating mines, blocking your path. It's all pretty hectic, but the worst obstacle comes at the end of every level - an invisible force field marked by a trench which is impossible to pass unless you have at least one trailing core. Of course, the more the better, because not only does each one add to your bonus once you complete a level, but they also act as extra lives: if you are hit while carrying one you lose the core, not your ship.
    Later levels feature more hazards - level three is a steep trench with tough moving rocks blocking your path, for example. We Speccy folk get ten levels to play with, but here's a spot of sickening information: rich 16-bit owners get twice as many. Yet another reason to H.A.T.E. them, eh? (Had to get a bit about the title of the game in somewhere!)
    Now if you've taken even the briefest butchers at our screen shots, and are the sort of cove who takes the snappiest of snap decisions, you may have decided what H.A.T.E. reminds you of already "Uridium, Uridium", the art department have been shouting out all day, but I can see many other touches in there, including even a hint of ST mega-hit Xenon in the plane/tank vehicle choice. Still, when did you last see a totally original shoot 'em up, and deed, getting back to the 'dubious plot' note we started out on, when did you last see a shoot 'em up scenario worth the paper it's written on? Not very recently, methinks, and taken on its merits alone - smoothness and playability - H.A.T.E. is a worthwhile game indeed.
    
    Article kindly typed up by Alan Maxwell

Ratings given by other magazines

8/10      7/10

Info supplied by the SPOT*ON database

YS Cross-references
		H.A.T.E./Gremlin	YS42	90
Some info from Sinclair Infoseek+SPOT*ON