THHE SPECTRUM GAMES DATABASE

MONSTERS IN HELL

PUBLISHER
Softek

AUTHOR
Unknown

YEAR
1983

CATEGORY
Platform

DESCRIPTION
It's Panic! in a slightly more Dungeons and Dragons form. In
other words, instead of digging holes and letting beasts fall
into them, you dig holes and let wizards fall into them!

CONTROLS
Cursor Keys
Cursor Joystick

INSTRUCTIONS
Your stick-man is trapped on a single screen of levels and
ladders. A warlock stands on the top left, creating minions which
work their way towards you with the intention of draining your
holy power! When your holy power is gone, you die, so it's
generally not a good idea to let them get to you! To help you,
you have some kind of magic hammer which you can use to bash
holes in the floor. The minions are pretty thick and will fall
down the holes if you lead them to them. Some minions will die
from a fall of a single level, later ones are more resilient!
Care must be taken not to fall into the fires of Hell which burn
beneath the lower level, but on some stages the fire is the only
way you're going to get rid of the nastier minions! Your holy
power drains slowly, but you can replenish it a little by
collecting the crucifixes that appear at random around the level.
There is no end to the game, it just keeps getting harder and
faster until you're dead! :)


SCORES RECEIVED
Monsters in Hell was DEFINITELY released before any games
reviewing magazines were about. I guess that makes it kind of
old.

GENERAL FACTS
It has to be said that even for the era, this is a pretty dismal
game.  It was a very early Speccy commercial release, true, but
it reminds me of someone's first attempt at a Basic game (and
indeed, it could very well be written in compiled Basic!).
The graphics are simple UDGs with no animation, and movement is
in large blocks of eight pixels at a time. The game's only
redeeming graphical feature is the "flames of Hell" effect, which
is actually not too bad.  Shame about the rest of the game.

NOTES
It's actually worth having a look at just to see how bad it
really is! I guarantee you will be amazed by the quality! ;)
