Eliminator

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Review: Eliminator

Psygnosis' Eliminator casts you as a prisoner of war sentenced to drive a hovercraft through eight different combat arenas for the entertainment of millions. Along the way, robotic craft try to stop you, and the time bomb strapped to your machine will explode if you don't succeed within a time limit.

It isn't a bad game. It can be fun racing through the huge, well-designed arenas and blasting robots to smithereens. Eliminator's time-based nature makes it frantic and impatient, and the four available craft give you more of a reason to play it again. It runs smoothly. The ambient/techno soundtrack by Simply Red's Aziz Ibrahim is a highlight of this otherwise dim game.

And while the enemies have the AI of the ghosts in Pac-Man, just when you've had enough mindless killing, the game throws in a target-based puzzle to keep things interesting.

Unfortunately, the keyboard controls are awful. You'd need ten fingers on each hand to efficiently use the default configuration, and using a joystick isn't much better, because you still have to rely on the keyboard to move the crosshair up and down. The multiplayer game is just the usual deathmatch. Even with a 3D accelerator, the graphics are low res and about PlayStation-quality. The camera often finds its way behind a wall or similar obstacle, and that makes it hard to see what's going on.

And while elements of Eliminator are familiar from games like Descent and Psygnosis' own Wipeout, it doesn't improve upon them. We've all played this hovercraft-racing-about-blasting-things stuff, but in Descent we have complete freedom of movement and Wipeout is much faster and has a better multiplayer component.

Eliminator just feels like ancient finger torture as you struggle to control your craft. I'd rather be pressing license plates.-- James Turner / GamePro