The Colony

STORY / GAMEPLAY
Mankind has left the carole of earth and is beginning to eye the galaxy. He has begun to colonize distant planets but has yet to meet any alien life forms. Until now... The Delta 5-5 colony is in trouble, and your mission is to head toward the colony with an Armored Cruiser that transfers the Space Marshals to investigate the situation. Your ship though crashed on the surface of the distant planet, and it looks like the only survivor is you, a Regional Marshal in the intergalactic force! And now, you need to rescue any survivors and assure that whatever happened to Delta 5-5 does not happen anywhere else. Fortunately you wear an F-21 Armored Spacesuit with advanced features and is designed to provide the wearer with near invulnerability in almost all "Close-Encounter" situations. Among many features, the F-21 offers two different firing modes at: The Automatic Tracking system in which you need do nothing to target your opponent, just Simply move so as to face your target and your targeting Crosshair will indicate an On-Target lock. The Manual targeting is much more complex and requires some practice before you can become proficient with it. However, it can prove to be a much faster and even more accurate system.
While you are walking around inside The Colony you will see everything as 3D solid-modeled representations. In order to work with an object you must first go up to it and it will be presented in a two-dimensional or bit-map mode. In this state you can work with the object. If you wanted to read what was on a computer screen for example, you need to click the mouse cursor on the screen and you would then see a dialog box representing the contents of the screen. To remove the dialog box you need to click once more on the dialog itself to remove it. If you want to open a desk drawer, the operation is just the same. Click on the drawer and it will open. If you wish to move any objects found from its current place in the drawer to the top of the desk, click and drag the item to the new location. In general, the game has a lot of RPG activities, combined with FPS gameplay. A rather innovative gameplay for a late 80's computer game!

GRAPHICS / SOUND
Graphics are solid 3D vectors (colored on Mac Color models) meaning they move quite fast. Detail is limited except when the scene is switching to 2D so that to investigate objects. Note that, each version of the game offers some unique details based on the system you are playing it, e.g. there are Macs on the ship's desks when playing the game on a Macintosh, there are Amiga 2000 when you play it on an Amiga and so on. The sound on the Mac is minimal, offering effects of solid laser-shots fulfilling their purpose, but doing little to enhance the game, in contrast to the Amiga version which offers plenty of sampled sound effects.