Tube Warriors

Isn't life full of surprises? Last month, there was us thinking that Flair's Dangerous Streets had to be the last word in awesomely awful beat 'em-ups but no!  here comes Tube Warriors all set to make us rethink just how bad games can get. The big pity with Tube Warriors is that the basic engine for an excellent Street Fighter 2 clone  or even a perfect conversion of the coin-op itself  is in place. Trouble is, it's obvious that having written it the programmers have no idea what to do with it. The backdrops, for example, move as nicely as any in Street Fighter, with loads of top foreground and background parallax effects, but they're just so drab and unexciting to look at. Likewise, the fighters are poorly drawn (something of an understatement, to be honest) and stiffly animated, but they bounce around swiftly enough. Now I could live with ropey graphics if the gameplay was any good but, to be blunt, it's a mess. The joystick control is sheer crap; if you simply want to walk left and right you have to make the character take each step by tapping the joystick in the required direction, so you can imagine what a nightmare the combat moves are to pull off. There are many other things I could go on about  the crude presentation, the fact that you can't choose your character in one player mode, the duff sound  but I think you get the idea. I took this home to review over the weekend and even my girlfriend, who still thinks Space Invaders is advanced computer entertainment, recognised it as crap. Stay well away for fear of contamination.

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