Leaving the beautiful game (not my words) behind us, we run as fast as we can away from International Match Day towards our next entry in the Your Sinclair Top 100; however it doesn’t bode well for us, as even the Your Sinclair description of Number #44 mentions that Rescue is “nothing remarkable”.
Rescue was published by the patron saints of 1980’s kids pocket money Mastertronic back in 1987, created by Ste L. Cork & Mark O’Neill, and with some rather fantastic 48K music provided by Tiny Williams [listen to that here].
The game of Rescue is a convoluted affair – scientists aboard the U.N.O. Deep Space Research Base, who were long forgotten, have gone and created the ultimate weapon. It’s now up to you to gather these eight scientists – plus their experiments – and bring them home. However your job isn’t going to be easy as Space Pirates have infiltrated the research base and they are going to do everything possible to secure the weapon for themselves.
I said convoluted earlier as this may sound like a simple run’n’shoot game, but it quickly becomes apparent as you progress into this rather nondescript budget title that your mission is going to be a long drawn out affair. Not with shooting bad guys and space pirates, oh no for that would be far to exciting. No, your mission is going to be blocking off entrances with crates and other inanimate objects and hoping to divert the rather crap, AI-free scientists towards the path you have left open for them; the only one you’ve been staring at for the past seven minutes!
It’s almost insulting to the games like Green Beret, Saboteur, RoboCop and Renegade when a game that is described as, “…isn’t really anything outstanding”, “the graphics are great but not outstanding”, “the sound is zappy but nothing remarkable”, and not forgetting, “the number of rooms and so on isn’t anything out of the ordinary, and “the runaround-arcade-adventure-zapping-collecting-and-rescuing (obviously) game design has been seen a thousand times before” by the magazine that placed it in the ruddy chart appears higher than those titles mentioned earlier! The only saving grace for Rescue is Tiny William’s opening theme and that’s just over two minutes long!
Originally published July 15, 2016. Updated October 25, 2022.
