** 0.5-0.33 page review / 432 words ** 

Aazhom Krypht
Reviewed by Colin Monro

** AAZ.GIF here **

Ever played Mortal Kombat? If you have 'nuff said. Aazhom Krypht is a Falcon only fighting game between you and a computer controlled opponent - unless you have a 'friend' kicking around in which case you can kick them instead and play head to head.
The game features TrueColor, digitised graphics, lifelike and painful sounding sonic effects - including a range of techno backing tracks and superb, near-photographic backgrounds, which scroll with the action.
The game is compacted and has to be extracted onto hard disk - requiring around 13Mb of space! All the fighting moves - head butts, high kicks, jumps and so on, can be executed from the keyboard it's much easier to use a Jaguar joypad and let this take the punishment instead. I also the keyboard had a tendency to lock up which didn't afflict playing by joypad.

There are five challengers to select between, ranging from a psychotic surfer to a kamikaze keep-fit female warrior. The opponent is drawn from the same five characters. The difficulty  and background can be selected. Unfortunately the backgrounds are not three dimensional but apart from this the game makes good use of the Falcon's hardware resulting in fast animation and quick responses.

After easing gently into the game selecting the lowest difficulty level to get the hang of the moves I spent most of the time wondering if I was a natural born killer as I trashed yet another unlucky warrior's ribcage. After upping the difficulty level a couple of notches I stopped wondering and started worrying - this game gets hot! I do feel the makers are stretching the truth a bit when they say that the moves reflect genuine fighting - how many karate experts have you seen teleport around a gym, eh?

A word of warning to parents. This is a violent computer game which contains sampled bad language. Let's assume the bad language is just over-exuberance by the translators, slap a 15 certificate on it, and recommend it as nose-breakingly good fun...

** Product boxout ***
Aazhom Krypht
Publisher: Logitron
UK distribution: 16/32 Systems
Telephone: +44 (0)1634 710788
Email: 16-32@premier.co.uk
RRP: £35
System: Falcon with 4Mb memory minimum, any colour display, joypad recommended.
Pros: Wide difficulty range, good graphics/sonics
Cons: Unnecessarily bad language, poor backgrounds
** Maybe a 15 logo instead of Age range? **
Age range: 15 plus
Rating: 70%
*** end boxout ***