$900|2-M.D.K.
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|1-Interplay & Shiney Entertainment



    System Requirements: Pentium 90+
                         16 megs of ram
                         SB compat.
                         SVGA 256+
    Availability:        £29.99
                         The Electronics Boutique

                            Reviewed by D!ck

The  PC  v Console game war is really hotting up now, MDK from Shiney is
the latest salvo from the PC side, and what a hit this is going to be!

You  play  the part of Kurt, our hero, is his spanky black suit with his
head-mountable gun, as he romps around giant land-crawling machines that
are  threatening to chew up various tiny villages and make a mess of the
local road network and economy.  Helped by his six-legged dog, Kurt must
repell the invaders.

                   T H E   S T O R Y   S O   F A R . . .

Yes  they're  from  Space,  it's  like this, see...  they travel through
space  on energy streams, which Earth scientists decided to tap into for
unlimited  power.  Unfortunately this makes Earth the equivalent of your
local shopping centre, more handy for the buses and closer to the shops,
that kind of thing, anyway...

This  has got to be THE game of 1997, it's more frantic than Mario, more
puzzling and exciting than Tomb Raider, and better looking, sounding and
more playable than both of them put together.  Kurt runs around the huge
land-crawlers,  shooting  robots,  ship  squadrons, generators and alien
beasties,  until  faced with your typical alien end-of-level Mr.Big, who
he promptly dispatches.

                         O H   W O W   M A N !

I don't know what those guys at Shiney were smoking during the develope-
ment  of  this game, but some of the levels, weapons and features in MDK
are  truly  bizarre.  Cow bombs, playrooms and Earthworm Jim all make an
appearance, it's a very weird game and no mistake.

But  the basic objective is to run around killing robots and aliens, and
this  is  where the game grabs you and pulls you right in.  You can play
it in either DOS or Windows (it uses DirectX in Win95, so all you Matrox
Mystique  owners (like me!) can look forward to improved speed), and the
game is more or less perfect.  The usual array of customising options is
there, support for keyboard, stick, pad etc, what more do you want?

There  are  six  huge levels, and if MDK has a fault it lies in the fact
that  you can only save games after completing a level, which means that
if  you  die,  you have to start the whole thing again.  That said, it's
probably  more  challenging because of this, although no way did it give
us  the 60 hours of gameplay we were led to expect.  The default diffic-
ulty level is just too easy, we have yet to try it on hard.

After  all  this,  you might expect the end-of-game sequence to be a bit
poor, but no, I can honestly say it's the best one I have seen in a long
long  time, if not THE best I have ever seen, but I won't spoil that for
you, you can find it out for yourself.

                   G R O O V Y   W O R D B E N D E R

Some scores then, for MDK:

    Graphics    - 100% - Very varied and very fast on a decent PC, the
                            levels are varied and the baddies are great.
    Sound       - 100% - Sometimes spooky, sometime wacky, always cool
                            and always apt for the area you're in.
    Playability - 100% - Spot on, easy to control but still has those
                            tricky sections to tax you.
    Lastability -  90% - Just a little bit too easy, although the great
                            distances between saves ain't too bad.
    Overall     -  97% - Miss it and you'll kick yourself, it's awesome!

D!ck