Raid on Fort Knox (1982) Review

https://www.consolemad.co.uk/shop/commodore/vic-20-cartridges/raid-on-fort-knox/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_KqNGgHEg4

Raid on Fort Knox is one of the more complex games ever created in the 1980s, in a much more complex game platform which most people have difficulty inserting the game to load it. Only available on the Commodore VIC-20 platform, it is a maze game that takes survival and greed for a robber to navigate around the corridors of Fort Kitox, to obtain several gold bars and transport them back to where he came from, while avoiding the resident panthers patrolling the areas.

The player must control the robber character to go up, down, left or right around the maze tunnels to reach the area where the gold bars lie. The AI-controlled panther enemies will be loitering around every corridor of the maze and the player dies upon contact with an enemy, each costing a life of the player. The game starts off with two enemies, but the number would increase in each level onwards and they will pick up speed whenever the player has collected the gold bars and/or put them in the player’s starting position. The player also has a timer when he obtains a gold bar, signifying that he will lose it if it is not moved to the place where he first spawned. The player is however not allowed to obtain any more gold bars if he is carrying one, so he is forced to return to the vaults to collect another gold bar once he has carried the gold bar in his possession to his starting position. Once all the gold bars in the maze are collected and moved to his spawn area, the player wins the level of the game and progresses to the next one. If the player runs out of all three lives by the panthers, the game is over.

What makes this game really difficult is not only because of the speed difficulty in each level, but also the platform for the game that is played on, Commodore VIC-20, as the only equipment is a keyboard and a separate joystick that is only made for that platform. Controls of the Commodore joystick is complex that may compromise the movements of the player, fixing the direction to be always straight. Because of this mechanism in the platform, the player must know and carry out the right time to turn his/her character to move up, down, left or right to adjacent corridors, otherwise miss them, get stuck at a corner, or worse run straight into the path of a panther.

Despite the difficulties faced in controlling the player, the game’s gameplay, graphics and sounds are actually that appealing (and comical) that stands out in the game, which makes it so well designed, simple and effective. If you are a fan of maze games, Raid on Fort Knox is worth something to look at if you need to understand the b