Academy: Tau Ceti II

Title		Academy: Tau Ceti II
Game Type	3D Combat Sim
Company		ComTec, CRL, 1988
Players		1
Compatibility	Kickstart 1.2
Submission      Callas

Review
Academy is the sequel to Tau Ceti.

Tau Ceti was originally an 8 bit game written for the Spectrum. Tau Ceti
recieved rave reviews and with good reason - it is a truly fantastic
game. The game was set in 2050, with humans having colonised four other
planets. Two of the planets were abandoned in about 2040 due to a plague.
While abandoned, one of these planets, Tau Ceti, was hit my an asteriod
and the robot systems on the planet went haywire.  They now attack
anything that lands on sight. Your role in Tau Ceti is to shutdown the
central planetry reactor by travelling in your armoured hovercraft from
city to city, collecting cooling rods.

Academy and Tau Ceti use the same game format. You have a first person
view of the city from your hovercraft. You move and travel around and
attack the robot defence systems, dock with buildings, resupply, and use
teleport pads to travel from city to city.

Tau Ceti however had a strong central plot which you followed, collecting
rods. You had freedom of movement to travel from city to city in the
order and manner of your choice, and how you went about defeating a city's
defences was entirely up to you. In this sense, it was rather like Elite
- you had freedom, but a mission.

Academy lost this freedom, because it merely presented you with a series
of short missions, essentially "one city" missions. It was basically the
Tau Ceti engine, sans the plot, with a bunch of individual seperate tasks
to perform. An easy sequel. It added to Tau Ceti in that you could design
your own hovercraft and added some extra buildings and improved the
intellegence of the robots, but none of this made up, for me, for what was
lost. Most of the missions are interesting, but...well, I prefer freedom
and continuity of plot, not serial, unrelated missions.

However, all of this deals merely with the game, not the implimentation.

On the Spectrum, Tau Ceti is beautiful and Academy uses the same graphics.

On the Amiga, sad to say, the presentation and graphics are appalling.
They are much worse than the 8 bit Spectrum version. In fact they are
so awful the game actually descends into the realm of truely unplayable.
Flat, few colours, no shading ...it's like watching a 1979 Atari, not a 1989
Amiga. IMO, the fact that the game fails with kickstart 1.3 is indicative
of the way in which the game was made.

I recommend the Spectrum version - get a Spectrum emulator and download the
game.

I recommend you totally avoid the Amiga version and don't waste your time
on it.

Alphabetical list.