Daylight Robbery

Your Sinclair review (Recovered) courtesy of the YS Rock 'n' Roll Years YS80

Daylight Robbery (SAM) Supplement Software     £4.50     Aug 1992

Yahoo! Yippeeyihay! And other Western-type noises. It's the Supple Boys (yet again) with Daylight Robbery, a NON-PUZZLE! game that fair lives up to its name in two striking ways. Firsly, it's about bank robbers working in daylight, and secondly it's been shamelessly stolen from the old Dinamic game West Bank. Caramba!

If you manage to avoid tripping clumsily over the discarded morals that tumble from the envelope along with the disk, you'll find that it's actually a rather fun little game. The idea's dead simple. You're Mad Al, the bank teller, and you're presented with three doors. The doors randomly fly open, equally randomly revealing robbers or honest citizens making a hefty deposit. Taking in the situation at a glance, you have to stab one of three keys to blast the villains, or else leave well alone until the honest citizen wanders off.

Once three deposits have been made, you can scroll to a different part of the bank. Once all twelve accounts have been filled, you jump to the next level by way of a quick reflex-testing shootout with a real tough hombre. And that's it. Graphics are colourful and almost animated, while the sound manages the not-inconsiderable feat of being worse than Brainache's.

There's a nice Western-y bass line, but the harmony appears to have been composed by carelessly distributing the same three notes about a scale. There's an annoying control problem - to scroll around the bank, you wait until all three doors are closed, then hold down fire and press one of the three controls. Alas, more often than not, one of the doors flies open unexpectedly, and as the program's already registered your keypress, another happy depositor gets a lungful o' lead.

Apart from this fault, the game is terribly playable, provoking the kind of mindless fascination previously monopolised by those old seaside shooting galleries. But there's no more to it than a test of reflex, and while this is rattling good fun for a while, it doesn't make for lasting appeal.

Verdict: 65%