Destiny is a first-person walkabout, similar in concept, graphically and in its gameplay, to Doom from RCI. However, the Author, Rob Templeman, promises far more depth in gameplay and a far more open style of play, which is apparently better. At least, that's the idea. It has a storyline, which roughly translated reads 'Lost with gun. Got to get out via baddies with bigger guns.' I won't attempt to soil your minds with the rest; it took me a good couple of days to recover from the literary shock.

Installing the game is laughably simple (hurrah) but it is on loading the frontend that one catches the first whiffs of turd in the alleyway. Bug-ridden and confusing, with scant regard with RISC OS conventions, I was glad to just get through it and into the game proper. I find it hard to believe that Tau published the game without first getting someone to finally sort this out. That said, the author has to be congratulated on providing such a wealth of options for setting up the game to your exact specifications, including 3 different screen resolutions and a whole series of texture resolutions, allowing a 64MB machine (yes!) to be taken full advantage of if the power is there.

Whereas games such as Wolfenstein 3D could be played on an old A3000 if you reduced the screensize, and Doom plays perfectly happily on an old Risc PC, Destiny quite definitely needs a StrongARM. To add insult to injury (for who would be truly annoyed if the game were a graphical wonder?) the complexity of the game's graphics, in computing terms, are little more sophisticated than Doom.
 

"Oh stop whining", I hear you cry. It's a StrongARM-only game. Fair enough. So let's wheel out a StrongARM machine and put it on high resolution screen and textures, with all the bells and whistles. Guess what? Aside from a vaguely irritating menu screen, the opening room is enough to perk me up. Piles of stuff to pick up and I set about trying them out. Whoops.
 

You know I mentioned a fold-out manual? Well, you will know that when it comes to reference manuals, for irritability it's a straight competition between big thick books with spines that snap shut when you remove your hand, and bloody big bits of paper that won't fit on the desk. Enter the Destiny manual. An unstapled masterpeice of oversight from which one must fathom the depths of the most ridiculously complex control system in the history of computer games.

Haha, you think. I will reconfigure the controls, and you emerge from the reconfiguration with every digit poised over a tactically essential key, with the others arranged logically and within easy reach. The basics of swimming while lying down, jumping and throwing hard simultaneously are now at your command, or so you think. You finally feel ready for the challenge.
 

Unfortunately the frontend is so bug-ridden that actually setting and saving these controls crashes the whole thing, destroying 20 minutes' work. You soon discover that, yes, it is not possible to reconfigure the keys, so employing additional limbs and 'other organs', it is eventually possible to encounter your first enemy, hopefully without someone walking into the room and catching you astride your keyboard gasping 'Shoot! Shoot!', between your teeth.
 

The fact is, 30 percent, at least, of the keys in the game could be done away with altogether if the control system was rethought a little. Separate keys for throw and throw hard is sheer madness, as are the use of separate keys for locking on and firing missiles, or jumping and swimming up. When you can't even reconfigure these bizarre insanities, it becomes something which severely damages one's enjoyment of the game. When 'mouse look' is available, why the game insists on your setting elevation sights before throwing an object, I have no idea.

Doom's enemies all look vastly different, so you can choose on sight which weapon to use for each, whereas Destiny's all seem to look the same from a distance. The way Doom's enemies flash when they fire means that you can see who is shooting you from miles away, whereas in Destiny you can be walking across a chasm and start being shot be an enemy you can't even see, let alone shoot back at. Destiny's weapon system is hopeless - the inventory system is so bug-ridden and the ammo indicators so unclear that it's usually unclear what weapon you are holding, let alone which button to press to choose the right one. I, for instance, was unable to hold two guns at all because I was holding about 20 half-empty clips and you can only change to two guns when you have two completely full ones. Bemusing at best, violence-inducingly irritating at the worst.
 

It's not all negative by any means - the level graphics are quite appealing most of the time and the rooms look rather nice. Even the enemies are not ugly, just confusing. However, because of the way the enemies act, the huge vast levels which you have to run back and forth across become a complete pain, and you soon lose any wonder for the visual confectionary. Just to compound the problems, the sound and music are dismal to the point of turning it off and putting on the hi-fi. The sound effects especially are almost useless and have much to do with the lack of orientation and atmosphere - a surprising omission given that producing sound effects is so easy these days. This lack of atmosphere means that what can be such an easy way of giving a product lasting appeal has been skipped over - like most aspects of the game.

Overall, a project that had potential, but which was let down by almost complete ignorance of all the comments returned by playtesters, several of whom where Acorn Arcade writers, and an ignorance of many important game features. The RISC OS games scene is getting dry as a bone, and if we are to be honest, it is unlikely that we will see anything remotely on the scale of this project again apart from Artex's TEK.
 

Mountains of work has been poured into it and the author has good cause to be proud of his baby, but £30? At £10-£15 it would be an amusing enough lark, but at the current price it would be difficult to play without thinking of all the other things you could have spent the money on.

• Huge levels
• Long lifetime
• Lots of setup options

• Poor monster graphics
• Misleading level design
• Poor monster AI
• Bug-ridden
• Overcomplicated controls
• Dire audio