Game:

Payback (2001)

Category:

Review

Duration: 1:02:16

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”EARTH, 2562 A.D. - After centuries of war and suffering, peace slowly began to return to the world. Just as civilization had started to recover, however, another crisis fell upon it - an extra-terrestrial armada pillaged the earth, taking with them virtually all of the known supplies of gold. Society was plunged into chaos – financial markets experienced a recession of unparalleled proportions, electronics production ceased altogether, and people with dental fillings dared not wander out in public.

An international task force was created with the aim of recovering the gold. Scraping together what they could with the miniscule amount that had not been plundered, a shuttle was constructed that would serve justice upon the invaders. It contained a few spherical exploration pods, which would navigate the planetary surface by means of bouncing upon it. You are responsible for piloting the pods and returning all of the gold to Earth. If this mission fails, humanity will be doomed to return to the Stone Age.”

You control an exploration pod and on each level you have to find and collect all of the stolen gold. When the final piece of gold is collected the exit door will be activated and you can proceed to the next level. The gold is to find in the flashing checkerboard squares. The exit door has a moving pattern that looks like waves, when closed the waves are small, when all gold is collected and the door is open the waves are bigger.

You will not have played for long before you find squares with diagonal lines. These are teleports and it is important to learn to use these correct. If you jump into them with full speed you will have this momentum when you come out again, this is necessary for doing some accurate jumping on the later levels. The pod has inertia so you have variable speed, and can therefore do jumping in a lot of different lengths.

When you come to a path where more than two squares is missing, which is the maximum you can jump, it is because you need to find a "switch square". Jumping on this square will make the path solid, but the game also includes puzzle elements, so sometimes you may need to disable a switch again, or activate some in a certain order.

Some places (very dark squares) have unstable ground that will dissappear when you jump on it, other places there are no ground under the gold so you can only jump there once to collect the gold.

The pitch-black tar squares will kill you if you jump on them, and jumping off the paths will off course also kill you. As you proceed this will become your biggest problem, because you will come to a lot of places with moving squares, and you have to watch their patterns carefully so you can jump from square to square.

There are also speed squares, these will give you extra speed so you can jump very long. These squares are working in all four directions, so depending on how you jump onto them, you can make a long jump in whatever direction you would like. If you find a square with a "+" it is a good thing to jump onto it, because it is an extra life.

There are 15 levels and on the 14 first you can get bonus points if you beat a certain time (par). On level 15 there is a timer counting down, and you only have 64 seconds to complete this final level.

The renderer is pseudo 3D and all the environment is projected from a flat tilemap. The Z80 is capable of handling this at a very fine speed. Everything is running fast and smooth with impressive scaling and scrolling, and there is no reason for the game to run faster. The controls of the pod are excellent, fast and responsive, and you can do some very precise jumping. The background features parallax scrolling stars.

The difficulty soon becomes very hard because of the moving squares, but then there will come some easy levels without this, so it is not like the difficulty is increasing as you proceed. It is a bit up and down what levels that are tough or not, and if you have the patience it will be possible to memorise many of the patterns the squares are moving in.

The game has a password system so you can start on any of the levels you would like. Arcade mode is a point score based game with limited lives, while the casual mode has infinite lives but no point score.

This is an enhanced version with 6 extra levels, and they are meant to be played after completing the original 15 levels. This means that these are tough and challenging expert levels, except for the last one that is more like a tribute to the player for completing the game. Now with 21 levels instead of 15 and still 48k compatible.

Enhanced: 4:31
Standard: 18:15

A great game and technically very impressive.

Rating = 98%

The game was made by by John Connolly in 2020/21.

Buy cassette here (Digital download will also be available when bought): https://www.bitmapsoft.co.uk/product/cosmic-payback/