WAR HEADS
US Gold came with the classic, Beach Head, saw it was a winner and now it's set to conquer the world with Beach Head II. Rick Robson rallies his reinforcements and prepares to fight...
FAX BOX
Game: Beach Head II
Publisher: US Gold
Price: £7.95
Joystick: Kempston/Sinclair/Protek
Keys: Define your own
The evil Dictator from Beach Head is back again - but this time there's not a beach in sight. Even if he can't kick sand in the faces the weak and defenceless it'll take all your Stallone skills to overcome him in his new jungle setting.
This final battle takes place over four screens. First you must parachute your troops behind enemy lines from a helicopter. Just take care to avoid the raking fire of the dictator's pill box. Desperately your men take cover behind the first rampart. Mustering your forces you make a dash for the second wall. Beleaguered by the blitz of lead you must then combine bravery with brains, guts with guile. Some of your men will act as decoys, others will make futile suicide dashes, a brave few will succeed in bombing the machine gun only to die in the rapid rattle of lead.
But once under your command, you can turn the pill box against the dictators jungle fortress. Use it to give covering fire against tanks, land mines, tunnelers and even masonry dropped from the fortifications. In this way you can rescue your long-imprisoned comrades.
And now it's time to pursue the fleeing forces of evil. Back in your whirring attack chopper you hug the contours of the jungle escarpment, evading the natural hazards and missing the missiles. Success in this phase will take you to the end.
And as in all great battles - Vader vs Obi-wan Kenobi, Holmes vs Moriarty, Border vs Botham - the climax is a head to head, an eyeball to eyeball confrontation, just you and the dictator, glaring across a cavernous gulch, your only weapons knives, your wits and your will to win... between you the raging torrent roars, soon to claim its victim, you... or the dictator.
Of course if there's a touch of evil within you, there's no reason why you can't be the dictator. You can even use the game's fine one-to-one facility for a duel to the death.
Technically its hard to find fault with a game forged as formidably as any of US Gold's armoury. I found the final screen a bit wet (in more ways than one) after the furious hardware of the previous screens. But if you've got this far on all three levels of difficulty maybe you need the rest. And perhaps the fairly average graphics don't quite match up to the game play. But now I'm splitting hairs where most people'll just want to get in there and start splitting heads.
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