Previews// Gravity Crash

Now the things firing at me are homing in on me. And I have to shoot switches to open doors. And the water's gone yellow - damn, that's not water, it's lava. And lava burns.

Now there are little green men to rescue. And other little red men to shoot. Sometimes the red men are near the green men, and I shoot the wrong ones by accident. Sorry!

By the end of the training missions, the simple thrust and shoot game has become extremely complex without becoming in the slightest bit difficult. That is, not difficult to understand - playing it is a different matter altogether. It's not necessarily hard, per se, but it is becoming pretty tricky. I want to play on, and I do, through the first solar system. Each of the game's five solar system has five normal planets, one boss planet and one bonus planet that can be unlocked by collecting an artefact on each of the normal planets. So, thirty five worlds in total, and some of them are pretty big: up to 10 screens wide by eight tall!

I cannot help notice as I proudly finish one level in 2:34 seconds that the target time is 30 seconds. "The record is 19 seconds" Stewart points out, puncturing my balloon. Clearly I have some practising to do. I'm looking forward to that.

Stewart takes the controller again and begins to play levels he has unlocked in the Campaign mode. These can then be revisited in Planet mode. I see a level where switches cause the lava to rise, trapping Stewart in a cave, from which he escapes by blasting away at the landscape, to create an escape route. He shoots the engines off a huge flying ship, and sends it crashing into enemies below. He plays cat and missile with… well not with a mouse, until it runs out of fuel. I see gravity wells, and repellers that make the level a punishing puzzle. And all of this is in a visual style that is at first simple, but as you play reveals all manner of graphical niceness. Its a game Jeff Minter might approve of.

Then we play multi-player, and he lets me win at Deathmatch and Treasure modes, before kicking my ass at the race mode on a track he designed.

Gravity Crash seems bound to be a hit with old-skool gamers such as myself but, with any luck, younger gamers will get attracted by its mass appeal. As I left JAW's offices, I found myself aching to play one more game, like all arcade classics should leave you feeling.

Next week, we'll tell you something about Gravity Crash's excellent level editor, and why this gives the game infinite playability potential.