Yep, it's you. Your objective is to 'mend the ruptured fabric of time', which in this case entails wandering around a maze of platforms shooting aliens, rescuing hostages, collecting keys, battling against big end-of-level meanies, and drinking lots of coffee in a vain attempt to stay awake. Zone Warriors features a 3D maze on a 2D screen, which means lots of confusing 'into-the-screen' doorways and heavy reliance on a compass. Getting your bearings isn't helped any by the fact that all the screens look exactly the same, which isn't surprising when you realise that they're all made up of a very small number of blocks, which are thrown haphazardly together to provide some kind of rudimentary attempt at distinctive levels. Occasionally while traipsing around you'll find a captive who you can rescue, or a power-up of some frighteningly imaginative description (ie three-way or five-way fire, or even a speedup if you're really lucky), and that, as they say, is about it. If by some miracle you manage to maintain interest beyond the first 20 minutes, you may well stumble across one of the big boss baddies (once you've collected the key to the room he's hiding in), and if you kill him you'll get to travel on through time to the next level, where you get to do it all all over again. Then again, you may not. You're unlikely to care either way.

VERDICT

I'm absolutely amazed that a respected software house like EA have allowed their name to be put on such an appalling release. Zone Warrior's only chance of concealing the astoundingly tedious, repetitive, pointless and unrewarding gameplay found here would be to eclipse it with staggering technical effects, but the graphics and sound are so unremittingly mediocre that there's no chance of that whatsoever. The programmers have made a half-hearted attempt at ripping off Turrican, but even that rather characterless blaster had more life to it than this. Playing the game with one hand whilst reading a newspaper and eating my lunch I still couldn't get myself killed for over 30 minutes in my first game, and I only managed it then because the phone rang. In the intervening time I'd run around some featureless junglescape, shot some aliens, run around some featureless junglescape, shot some aliens, run around some featureless - well, you get the idea. I haven't seen anything quite this lame for a very long time.

Dull, terminally unimaginative graphics in a very small playing area.

Gameplay gets hopelessly tedious within two minutes (that's not an exaggeration, either).

Only the most bloody-minded will ever bother to reach level 2.

...and it isn't worth the effort.

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