You find yourself in the city of AntEsher, named after, we presume, Dutch mathematical artist MC Escher.  You have to rescue your girlfriend or boyfriend, in a nice change you can choose to play as a boy or a girl, more of this please software developers. 

Rescue from what you say? Why giant ants of course. 

You start at the outskirts of the city and have to explore it to find your trapped partner. You lead them to safety while being pursued by the aforementioned ants, who are desperate to make you their dinner. 

To help you have some grenades you can fire at the ants to send them to ant hell, or jump on them to paralyse them. You can be bitten 20 times before it’s game over, but be warned, once trapped 20 bites can come very quickly.

As you can probably tell from the gameplay footage, this game is graphically stunning. The author, Sandy White, is a sculptor, and this understanding of 3D construction has enabled him to make what must be the best-looking Spectrum game we have ever seen. We can’t see how graphics can get much better than this. 

You can change the camera angle if you disappear behind a bit of scenery so you’ll never get stuck, and the whole city is so beautiful you’ll want to explore every inch. However, this is where our major gripe of the game comes in. 

When you are being pursued by the ants, in a panic this has caused us more deaths than we care to mention

The controls are rather unintuitive; instead of using a key for each direction, you need to rotate your character and then walk forward in the direction they are facing. When you are being pursued by the ants, in a panic this has caused us more deaths than we care to mention. With additional keys to throw your grenades at different distances and the camera changing keys there are 12 keys to learn, we find this far too many to be a good gameplay experience.

But even with the control gripes we have to recommend Ant Attack. The graphics are just so beautiful, and once you manage to get the controls working, the city is so well-designed and interesting you want to play more and more. 

With 10 different levels all in the same city, you will eventually complete the game, and while you do, you’ll have an amazing time doing so. 

If Ant Attacks’ controls were better, this would have been an easy 10, but with the control difficulty, we are awarding it an 8/10. However, we still recommend this highly.

Cheats & Pokes

Description	Cheat
Infinite lives (rescuer)	36673,0
Infinite lives (rescuee)	36714,0
Infinite bombs	36122,0
Infinite time	36322,0