Nemac IV

Title		Nemac IV
Game Type	3D Action
Players		1
Compatibility	OS2.0+, 020+, 2 meg ram, CD only
Submission	John Haas (jhaas@novia.net)

Review
Nemac IV arrived towards the end of the first wave of "Doom clones" for
the Amiga.  It had a distinctly different look and feel than the others
(Breathless, Alien Breed 3D, Fears, Gloom, etc.) and obviously took a huge
amount of effort to create.  The levels (and there are 40 of them) are
immense and very impressive graphically.  There is a great deal of texture
mapping and the detail is amazing.

System Requirements/Configuration The minimum system requirements are
pretty low: OS2.0+, '020 or better, 2 meg ram, 5 meg hard drive space and
a 2x or better CDRom drive.  I'm not sure how playable the game would be
using an '020 but I would guess it would not work very well.  Notice that
AGA is not required.  In a somewhat unusual move, the authors chose to
support just about ALL Amigas--OCS, ECS, AGA and graphics cards!  I never
thought I'd be playing a game of this type on my '030/33 powered A600 but
I do and it works well.

You can throw virtually any screen mode you want at it which makes for
some interesting experimentation. Most looked great but required more
horsepower than my '030/40 A1200 had, so my normal mode turned out to be
either PAL or NTSC low res.  The pixel resolution is adjustable, you have
high resolution 1x1 (which is wonderful but takes either a high-end
Amiga or requires a small window) or 2x2 (which starts looking like Alien
Breed 3D).  As in virtually all of the games of this type, the window size
is adjustable. I like the higher resolution pixel setting so my play
window is relatively small. If one doesn't mind the "AB3D look", then you
can go 2x2 on the pixels and have a full or nearly full screen play
window.  The bottom line is that to be enjoyable and playable, the all
important frame rate must be substantially high. Nemac IV gives you a
fighting chance to achieve this even with lower end Amigas because it is
so configurable.  One trick to get more speed on the slower machines is to
turn off the floor and ceiling textures. This speeds things up
considerably but makes the game much less interesting visually.

The Storyline
I really don't want to cover this, the plot is too huge and complicated.
In a nutshell: You're disguised as a robot and must make your way through
a massive bunker controlled by murderous enemy robots. The object is to
destroy this bunker.

Animations
Besides the huge ones at the beginning and end, the game contains several
smaller ones.  These must have taken a huge amount of work and are a nice
touch.  They appear every few levels and serve several purposes:
Foreshadowing an enemy or weapon that you'll be facing soon, plot
definition, or just plain entertainment (one is even humorous).

Explosions and Light effects
One of the truly neat effects of Nemac IV are the explosions.  Not only
are they stunning looking but objects in the vicinity of them actually
react.  Some health might be blown across a room or some ordnance such as
a grenade might itself be detonated by another explosion.  You can blow
things up on the other side of walls and doors which is very useful.

Enemies
You'll encounter about a dozen or so different kinds of enemy robots.
These range in size from very small ones, which are harmless and look like
a shoebox, to huge, seemingly invincible, grenade slinging bipeds.

Weapons
Not a huge selection here.  You have grenades, remotely detonated bombs,
machine guns and plasma guns. While not great in number, they are simple,
effective and fun to use. This game is proof that you don't necessarily
need a vast assortment of weapons for it to be enjoyable. The grenade was
by far the most fun to use.

Puzzles
As is standard with this type of game, the player navigates a maze in
search of the exit. Puzzles and traps abound. The puzzles consist mostly
of tripping switches to activate doors and walls and acquiring codes to
open doors leading to previously unreachable sections.  Some of these
puzzles really make you think.

Secret Levels (criticism)
As mentioned earlier, the game has 40 levels: 37 regular and 3 secret
ones.  The secret ones were notoriously hard to find (at least for me!).
I played the game from beginning to end three times and only stumbled onto
a secret level once. I had to resort to a cheat found on Aminet to
finally play the other two secret levels.

Bugs (Slowdowns, freezes, etc.)
I like this game a lot but did find it to be somewhat buggy.  It was prone
to annoying slowdowns, freezes and outright crashes. There are two types
of slowdowns. The first type occurs when there is a lot of action going on
and (I'm guessing) would not happen on a more powerful Amiga. The second
type of slowdown would occur when almost nothing was happening. This
happened consistently on certain levels. Sometimes the game would snap
out of this funk within a minute or two, sometimes it would freeze for
long periods of time, and sometimes it would simply freeze permanently
(crash). Sometimes I was able to pass through walls which I should not
have been able to do.  One level (18 I believe), is a real mess with walls
that come and go and I'm certain it wasn't programmed that way.
Occasionally I would find myself being fired upon by an enemy robot only
to find that it was imbedded in a wall and not visible to me.

Despite bugs such as this, the game is very playable and very enjoyable.  I
must say that I got quite hooked on it and would strongly recommend it.

Alphabetical list.