Metal Mutant is a side scrolling action adventure game developed and published in 1991 by the French house Silmarils for the Atari ST, Amiga (OCS) and DOS. The game plays and feels pretty much like the other great games from Silmarils: Targhan, Starblade and Colorado. The Amiga version comes in 1 disk.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY The story takes place somewhere in the far future where a scientist invents and develops a super computer named Arod 7, to watch and protect all colonies. But it seems that the colonists have had enough by this machine's control over their lives and now rebel teams are almost everywhere. You control the "Metal Mutant Machine" a rebel-made super robot and land to the planet Kronox in order to find and destroy Arod 7. As Metal Mutant, you have the ability to transform into three different metal morphs: First one is the Cyborg, a humanoid robot that carries a devastating axe and a deadly fork. Cyborg can jump through long gaps with ease or even lift itself using a steel rope launcher when needed. The second morph is called Dino and it's a powerful metal dinosaur that can forcefully bite its opponents (especially the shorter ones) and also throw flames through its mouth and tail. The third one is Tank, a caterpillar-driven robot that looks like a small tank from World War I (!) This guy uses a torpedo launcher and can fire towards the enemy from a great distance and in all 8 directions. You can transform into these mutants by pressing at any time Down and Fire simultaneously, depending on the situation you're in to and on the type of enemies you are about to battle. Walking through the planet's surface you collect various upgrades than can help increase energy, power up your weapons so that you can survive. Difficulty level is getting gradually higher, so you'll have the time to master the game's mechanics and the control of your mutants.
GRAPHICS / SOUND Metal Mutant features some good environments, greatly drawn sprites (especially the three Metal Mutants) and quite smooth animation while the game's color palette is mainly based on green. As for the sound, Metal Mutant has a wide variety of in-game sampled sound effects from ambient, eerie sounds to each mutant's specific sounds. The intro music is a well composed sampled theme (as Silmarils uses in every of their game). Generally, the Amiga version of the game looks almost identical to the Atari ST counterpart (since it's a ST port) and the DOS VGA version.
CPU: Motorola MC68000 7.16 MHz MEMORY: 512KB of Chip RAM (OCS chipset - A500), 512 KB of Slow RAM or Trapdoor RAM can be added via the trapdoor expansion, up to 8 MB of Fast RAM or a Hard drive can be added via the side expansion slot. The ECS chipset (A500+) offered 1MB on board to 2MB (extended) of Chip RAM. GRAPHICS: The OCS chipset (Amiga 500) features planar graphics (codename Denise custom chip), with up to 5 bit-planes (4 in hires), allowing 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32 color screens, from a 12bit RGB palette of 4096 colors. Resolutions varied from 320x256 (PAL, non-interlaced, up to 4096 colors) to 640x512 (interlace, up to 4 colors). Two special graphics modes where also included: Extra Half Bright with 64 colors and HAM with all 4096 colors on-screen. The ECS chipset models (Amiga 500+) offered same features but also extra high resolution screens up to 1280x512 pixels (4 colors at once). SOUND: (Paula) 4 hardware-mixed channels of 8-bit sound at up to 28 kHz. The hardware channels had independent volumes (65 levels) and sampling rates, and mixed down to two fully left and fully right stereo outputs