The Immortal - Electronic Arts RRP œ24.99
                 (Arcade adventure)

                 Reviewed by Roy Sims

The  old wizard Mordamir is trapped beneath the ancient  city  of 
Erinoch in the dark labyrinths below.  Your quest is to find  and 
rescue him from his fate.

The game is displayed with a 3D isometric view.  You control your 
robed  sprite  around the rooms with a  joystick.  Control  is  a 
little  awkward  at  first,  as you have  to  push  the  joystick 
diagonally  to walk straight and push straight in the  four  main 
directions to walk diagonally!

Each room is displayed on its own.  As you walk through the  door 
the  game  scrolls  quickly  into the  new  room  which  is  then 
displayed on screen. All other rooms surrounding the location you 
are currently in are blacked out.

If  you walk up to an object,  the display switches to a  message 
screen  asking  if you  want to take the object.  You are offered 
a Yes or No option.  All decisions made during the game are  done 
via  the message screen.  To see your inventory,  you  press  the 
Space bar which switches to a large screen which shows on average 
4-6  objects with the option to look at more if you are  carrying 
more.

All  monsters and characters that you come across  are  animated, 
and  there is a minimal arcade sequence which involves a  bit  of 
joystick  bashing when you fight a monster hand to hand.  If  you 
have  activated a fireball spell then pressing fire  will  launch 
one. The only trouble is that it's sometimes difficult to line up 
with  the monster in a 3D isometric view.  Your energy  is  shown 
along the top of the screen but you never know how many hits your 
enemy will take before it will die.

Sound  on  the ST is very basic.  You can  toggle  between  sound 
effects  and music,  but the music is naff and you'll  soon  find 
yourself turning the volume down all together.

The  Immortal  certainly  has some very  nice  graphics  and  the 
characters  do  animate very nicely.  I haven't  seen  many  real 
puzzles yet so it's uncertain how good an adventure it really is. 
The control method is a little awkward but you do get used to it. 
Unfortunately, there is no 'save game' option. What you get is an 
authorisation code at the end of every level which will allow you 
to start from the beginning of each level that  you  reach.  This 
means  you'll  have to play an entire level all the  way  through 
from start to finish to complete it.  Still, a certain well-known 
cartridge  device  does work very well on the game  and  so  gets 
around  this problem allowing you to save your position  wherever 
and whenever you like!

To conclude,  The Immortal looks like a very nice and atmospheric 
arcade  adventure which requires some joystick skills  along  the 
way.  It should be noted that the game comes on two double  sided 
disks and it requires 1 megabyte of memory to run!  The disks can 
be booted from drive B if you have an upgraded single sided 520ST 

with an internal single sided drive and an external double  sided 
drive. It will also only work on a colour monitor.

I'm  certainly looking forward to the deeper levels of the  game. 
The first level is very small as it serves as an introduction  to 
the game.  I hope that the other remaining seven levels are  much 
harder and larger!