Quazatron is an isometric action/puzzle game written by Steve Turner of Graftgold and published by Hewson Consultants in 1986. It is essentially a ZX Spectrum remake of Andrew Braybrook‘s Commodore 64 classic, Paradroid.

You control a droid called “Klepto” (KLP-2) and must destroy all of the hostile alien robots in the underground citadel of Quazatron, and subsequent locations on the planet Quartech. Destroying these robots is done by either shooting them; pushing them off a high ledge; repeatedly ramming them, or by taking control of them via a minigame called “Grapple“.

Each robot has a rating, which is shown as a letter and number on their chassis. The letter represents a robot’s type (R = Repair; B = Battle; U = Utility; C = Command, and so on), and the number indicates their power ranking, with the lowest numbers being the highest-ranked. So “R9” would be a very low-ranking repair droid, and “B1” would be a very high-ranking battle droid. The higher the ranking of an opponent, generally the tougher, more aggressive and more deadly they are.

The idea, then, is to carefully and systematically scour each level, looking at the ID codes of the robots moving around, and deciding to either avoid, destroy, or to grapple with them.

Pressing ‘G’ activates Grapple Mode, and a sound plays to warn you that you’re in that mode. Bumping into your target opponent, with Grapple Mode activated, should result in a screen appearing, detailing what kind of opponent you’re facing. You then choose one of the two available colours and have 60 seconds to win, by having more of your own colour on the chip than the colour of your opponent. If it’s a draw, then you both go again. If you lose, you drop down to the lowest power ranking, and only have a limited amount of time to win another grapple to try to build yourself back up again. Winning grapples also allows you to cannibalise parts from your defeated opponents, and to replace damaged components.

The biggest downside to playing Quazatron is that the screen scrolling and the in-game action is somewhat slow, which might put some off playing it. Which is a pity because it’s a very good game overall. It’s just a bit slow is all…

So the execution of Quazatron (and the lack of power in the Spectrum), lets it down somewhat. A sequel to this – called Magnetron (which was also designed and coded by Steve Turner) – was released in 1988 and attempts to rectify some of the issues with this game.

More: Quazatron on Wikipedia
More: Quazatron on World of Spectrum