Ork

Title           Ork
Category        Platform
Players         1
Compatibility   All
Submission      Joona Palaste (palaste@cc.helsinki.fi) Profiled Reviewer

Review
Ork is the least famous game of Psygnosis's famous "arcade trio": Agony,
Leander, Ork. It's also the only one of those that I personally own.
That's because I played a demo version of it and was so interested I went
ahead and bought the actual game. In my view, Ork hasn't got all the
credit it deserves. Let's have a look.

  The game is a 5-level platform game, where you get to solve puzzles,
collect objects and kill enemies. The plot is that you're a soldier in an
alien army trying to become a starship captain, and you're subjected to a
series of tests to see if you are captain material. The actual gaming
represents this series of tests.

  Graphics and sound play a major part in platform games, more so than in
strategy games, for example. Like you'd expect in a Psygnosis game, both
the graphics and the sound are excellent. Every one of the five levels has
a pleasingly realistic "organic alien world" theme, which varies from
level to level. All the other graphics are also very good, except for the
enemy sprites. They are fluidly animated, but are terribly monochromatic.
Some have likened them to cardboard cutouts, that is not far from the
truth.

  There is only one real music piece in Ork, the intro music. This music
is surprisingly good, it beats those of many other platforms, and it goes
on for several minutes. Well worth listening to. There is a "game over"
music too, but that's shorter and less interesting. In the game itself,
you only get sound effects. These do their job, but aren't that remarkable.

  As mentioned above, your character is an alien army soldier. This
character, called Ku-Kabul, looks like a red Tasmanian devil. He is armed
with a machine gun, and has an integrated jetpack for vertical travel. The
gun needs bullets, and the jetpack needs fuel, both of which can be
replenished by refills found in strategic places on the levels. Ku-Kabul
also can carry a number of items and use them on other places on the level
map.

  Every level also has one or more computer terminals, these can be used
to do many different tasks, such as looking at the level map, or
loading/saving your position (only one position per disk, however).

  Overall, Ork is a nice gaming experience, and well worth having.
However, it doesn't have anything to merit itself as a "classic" game, or
even any special awards. I haven't played Leander or Agony, but I think
they might well be the better part of this game trio.

  Ork works fine on all Amigas when booted from the floppies, but it comes
on non-standard disks, so to install to hard disk you need a special
WHDLoad installer, available from AmiNet.

Alphabetical list.