Since Penetrator is the first game I can remember playing on my Commodore 64, I must--in the interest of full disclosure--admit that I may love the game simply for reasons of nostalgia.
I am not sure of the storyline behind the game, but you play pilot to a fighter spacecraft penetrating into enemy territory to destroy the main computer. The objective is simple: survive attacks by ground-based missiles and airborne fighter craft to make your way to the mainframe and destroy it. You navigate your craft through side-scrolling levels armed with a forward-firing gun and missiles dropped from your ship.
Controls are rather simple: Use the joystick's up and down directions to move--you guessed it!--up and down. Forward will give you after-burner-like speed while backward holds your craft's position. (There is no going back in this game).
You will navigate through various land formations--any of which are deadly. If you touch the ground or ceiling in one of the caverns, you are toast. Missiles are launched at you from the ground and you die if you are impacted by them. The satellite dishes should be destroyed whenever possible to keep the "Enemy Intelligence" bar at the bottom as low as possible. The more satellite dishes you fail to destroy, the higher the Enemy's Intelligence goes. The higher the Enemy's Intelligence goes, the faster
the missiles are launched at you.
You are given 3 lives to complete your mission. If you die, you start the stage that you died in over. If you exhaust all your lives, you lose and have to start from the beginning. There is no option to "continue".
The game is relatively short and sweet and can be completed in 5 minutes or less if you can avoid dying: no extended gameplay time here. To this end, the creators included a feature that allows you to build your own levels. You can create the landscapes and place dishes, missiles, and fighters. This gives the game its only real replay value.
The graphics are nice for the Commodore 64 and at least get the job done sufficiently. The soundtrack is actually quite good for a game of its era. Controls are very simple and responsive but are also very sensitive: one wrong move in any of the tight corridors and you are toast.
While it is certainly not going to give hours upon hours of gameplay, Penetrator is a nice way to remember the good ol’ days of side-scrolling, spacefighter action before the days of Nintendo.
