No Exit

STORY / GAMEPLAY
No Exit is a quite interesting fighting game that stands out from its genre with very weird background graphics and sounds, although it doesn't offer much long term playing value. Each fight must be won within a time limit and the player can have 3 different attacks: an upper attack, a medium attack or a lower attack, as well as 3 respective parries. He can also roll downhill, jump or get a rest while moving supple (Oh, yes, you should always recover). An interesting feature of that game is that you must take care of your energy bar at all times, since you lose energy when jumping, striking to the air or caught by blows. So, in order to gain energy you must have your player perform recovery moves! Funny enough isn't it! Another unique feature is that, for 3 times in the game and for a limited time, you can change into a super powerful monster and take advantage during the fight! The game has 6 gradually increasing difficulty levels. Unfortunately, the blocky characters and limited range of moves condemn the game to the marginal underdog status.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The graphics on the CPC+ are nice, but quite odd, featuring weirdly colored backgrounds (for a fighting game) although it uses uses a more proper color palette compared to the CPC. The sprites are small but nicely animated, while the gameplay area is big enough (bigger than the CPC version). The Plus version takes advantage of its hardware sprites support, thus there a few flying objects at the background too (e.g. flying bats). Also, I was really impressed by the nicely animated main menu screen which looked more like a demo of the CPC+ graphics capabilities on scrolling and colors rather than a menu screen for a game. As far as the sound, the game offers a nice main menu theme (accompanied by the nicely animated scene) but only a few typical sound FX during gameplay.