Driller
97%, and nothing else on the machine looked like it
Incentive's 1987 debut for the Freescape engine put a solid, freely navigable 3D world on a 48K Spectrum. CRASH gave it 97%, The Games Machine 94%, and it stayed in the charts for years.
Driller is the game Freescape was built for: a solid three-dimensional world on 8-bit hardware that you move through freely, looking up and down, flying over structures and standing beneath them.
The task is methodical rather than frantic. The moon Mitral is riddled with gas pockets that will ignite; you tour eighteen sectors, site a drilling rig in each, and work out how to reach the sectors that refuse to let you in.
How it was received
| Magazine | Score | Date |
|---|---|---|
| CRASH | 97% | December 1987 |
| The Games Machine | 94% | December 1987 |
| ACE | 931/1000 | January 1988 |
| Sinclair User | 9/10 | December 1987 |
| Your Sinclair | 9/10 | January 1988 |
97% puts it alongside Head Over Heels and PAW at the top of the CRASH marks recorded in this Vault. CRASH was still citing the score four years later when reviewing 3D Construction Kit: “Driller (97%, Issue 47)”.
The game had a long tail. Your Sinclair returned to it at 90% in September 1989 and 97% in May 1991; CRASH re-reviewed budget re-releases at 86% and 87% in 1991. A 1991 Sinclair User re-review at 60% is the outlier, and by then it was four years old and being judged against 1991.
Why the score
Read the review dates against what else was shipping. In December 1987 the Spectrum’s showcase games were arcade conversions and isometric adventures. Driller offered filled polygons and an unconstrained camera on the same 48K.
The frame rate is low — a few frames per second — and that was accepted as the cost of the thing existing at all. Freescape hands the trade-off to the player through a resizable viewport: shrink the window onto the world and it moves faster.
What followed
Driller was the first of four Freescape games — Dark Side (95%), Total Eclipse (93%) and Castle Master (85%) — after which Incentive sold the engine itself as 3D Construction Kit.