THHE SPECTRUM GAMES DATABASE



MONSTERS IN HELL



PUBLISHER

Softek



AUTHOR

Unknown



YEAR

1983



CATEGORY

Platform



DESCRIPTION

It's Panic! in a slightly more Dungeons and Dragons form. In

other words, instead of digging holes and letting beasts fall

into them, you dig holes and let wizards fall into them!



CONTROLS

Cursor Keys

Cursor Joystick



INSTRUCTIONS

Your stick-man is trapped on a single screen of levels and

ladders. A warlock stands on the top left, creating minions which

work their way towards you with the intention of draining your

holy power! When your holy power is gone, you die, so it's

generally not a good idea to let them get to you! To help you,

you have some kind of magic hammer which you can use to bash

holes in the floor. The minions are pretty thick and will fall

down the holes if you lead them to them. Some minions will die

from a fall of a single level, later ones are more resilient!

Care must be taken not to fall into the fires of Hell which burn

beneath the lower level, but on some stages the fire is the only

way you're going to get rid of the nastier minions! Your holy

power drains slowly, but you can replenish it a little by

collecting the crucifixes that appear at random around the level.

There is no end to the game, it just keeps getting harder and

faster until you're dead! :)





SCORES RECEIVED

Monsters in Hell was DEFINITELY released before any games

reviewing magazines were about. I guess that makes it kind of

old.



GENERAL FACTS

It has to be said that even for the era, this is a pretty dismal

game.  It was a very early Speccy commercial release, true, but

it reminds me of someone's first attempt at a Basic game (and

indeed, it could very well be written in compiled Basic!).

The graphics are simple UDGs with no animation, and movement is

in large blocks of eight pixels at a time. The game's only

redeeming graphical feature is the "flames of Hell" effect, which

is actually not too bad.  Shame about the rest of the game.



NOTES

It's actually worth having a look at just to see how bad it

really is! I guarantee you will be amazed by the quality! ;)

