The idea of a ten-mile-wide
meteor smashing into the Earth
is nothing new. There's actually
one heading for Earth now
(seriously!) which will be with us
in about 135 years. There's a
good chance that most of us
won't be around to discover how
close it comes to hitting Earth
but, hey, why not while away a
few hours pretending danger's at
your doorstep by playing
Impact?
This meteor (the one in
the game, that is)
must be deflected
from the Earth's
path, and all other
attempts having
failed, the only way
to do that is for you to
find out where a now-dead scientist hid his
Repelling Beam
Machine, or
RBM. Find
it and the
Earth is
saved, don't
and it isn't.
As with all Laurence
Creighton
Quilled text-only
games you'll find that there are
more objects per square inch
than in just about any other
adventure around. There's action
a-plenty too, and right from the
start you'll find yourself in the
thick of things. As your quest
involves the search for the RBM
you'll be surprised to see that a
lot of the game takes place in a
rural setting. There's a river to
be crossed, ordinary roads to
travel along and a pretty normal
farmhouse to explore. The
objects you unearth are all
rather ordinary too. That's one
problem with Laurence's games
- you tend to find yourself in a
setting that doesn't fit into the
main theme of the game, with
objects that also seem to have
little use other than that for
which they were designed. I
mean, a meteorite is going to
obliterate the Earth and all you
seem to see are ordinary
locations, objects and people. Of
what possible use is a farmer's
wife? How can a needle and a
piece of cotton wool help save the
planet? On the other hand, the
beauty of Laurence's games lies
in the fact that, once you work
out what they do, all those
ordinary things have
extraordinary uses.
You'll experience the full
gamut of adventure styles within
this game. There's character
interaction (TALK TO... works
best) all manner of object
manipulation
and
combinations
(using the
good old
VERB/NOUN
convention) and
some
straightforward
examining and searching to boot.
A well-paced game, with several
twists in the tale before you
reach the end (that's either the
end of the Earth or the end of the
game). I have only two criticisms
- you can't carry much around
with you, and there are a few
sudden death-type stoppages
caused mainly by the character
interaction, and that's a bit
annoying to say the least.
