Sniper!

                                                         RANKINGS

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1. Viet Rampage - Score = 5.6   Tier = OK

Attempts to Beat: 4

Time to begin another series, this time a 6 book journey known as Sniper!, which ran from 1987-1988. I try to avoid learning too much about a series before going in, but this is one example where I do not believe I have heard ANYTHING about it, which probably doesn't bode well come to think of it. Still, the entries here are apparently all set on Earth, and I generally look forward to such adventures. The opening book sees us playing as John Strong (they really went all out with that name didn't they?),  a former Vietnam War veteran who now does freelance, ie mercenary work, for the CIA. I assume this is all meant to be set in 1987 or so, which is the year the book was published. The book opens with your Strong character holed up in a cheap motel room with his funds running low, as he has the bad habit of squandering the cash he makes from his assignments (which presumably means he blows it on wine, women, and song). This opening section also makes it clear that Strong suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, and is haunted by nightmares of the war, and especially what happened to a good friend of his, Wes Miller, who went missing in action. His most recent nightmare is interrupted by the arrival of his former commanding officer and CIA contact, Colonel Atkinson, who has a dangerous mission for him. It seems as though an American spy satellite has crashed in Vietnam, and with extremely sensitive classified information held within its data banks, it will only be a matter of time before either the Vietnamese or their Russian overseers locate this valuable piece of property, which would be disastrous for American interests. Atkinson has come to you because you are familiar with the area in which the satellite has crashed, and he wants you to sneak into the country, retrieve the data banks before the Russians, and then get the hell out. You have a couple of different things you can say to Atkinson, and depending on how this opening conversation plays out, you may also learn that American intelligence has pinpointed the location of a prisoner of war camp also in the area, where your friend and comrade Wes Miller may be held. (And even if you don't learn about Miller here, you will find out about this POW camp when you get to Vietnam anyway). So this now gives you two goals in your mission, and all the motivation you need to accept the challenge and head for Vietnam. 

As far as the game system goes, this is a TSR published book, and bears many similarities to some of their other series such as "Marvel Super-Heroes" and "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons". There is no character generation here, with your John Strong character given set stats in various attributes in the opening, although unfortunately there is no character card as in those other series, the stats are just printed on a page near the beginning. Your stats are broken up into 3 different component areas here. One of these areas being your assigned skill values for the 4 attributes of : Stealth, Hand to Hand Combat, Firing, and Bomb Throwing. The second area is for your weapons, and you are given values for how much damage each of them does, with these weapons including: Assault Rifle, Uzi, Bombs, Grenades, Pistol, and Commando Knife. Finally, you have your Health status, which can have 4 different states, these states being: Fit, Wounded, Impaired, or Incapacitated. You begin the adventure at Fit, and for each single hit you take, either through combat or some other injury noted in the text, you move down one level. If you ever reach Incapacitated, this means you are either captured or dead, and the game is over. Your Health state additionally impacts your Stealth attribute, with you suffering a penalty to your Stealth stat depending on how badly you are hurt, presumably because you cannot move around as well or as quietly. 

Like most other TSR adventures, this is a skill check book, but one with something of a "Cretan Chronicles" twist, in that it also contains combat that lowers your Health level each time an enemy hits you. Unlike that series however, you do not recharge back to full fitness after each fight. This usually means that the stealth approach is the way to go, especially since I did not find any Health recovery anywhere at all in the book, which means once you get hit 3 times over the course of the adventure, you are done for. That said, as you make your way through the jungles you are often given the option of shooting it out with any soldier or patrols you come across should you wish to play it that way, which is risky but not necessarily a death sentence, because the values your opponents need to roll in order to hit you are generally quite high. At the start of a combat, you will be told how many enemies you are facing (usually 3 or 4 at once), and the number they need to roll on two dice to score a hit on you. You always get first attack unless told otherwise, and are similarly told the number you need to roll in order to hit them, except in your case you get to add your modifiers for the Skill and the particular Weapon you are using. So for example if you are attacking with your Assault Rifle, you would get to add +3 for the rifle, and another +2 for your Firing stat. You rarely get to choose which weapon you wish to use yourself, but are told which one you are attacking with based upon the circumstances (attacking a single guard before he can raise the alarm will see you using your Commando Knife and Hand-to-Hand Combat values for example). You can only take out one enemy per round (and only if you score a successful hit of course), at which point each surviving enemy gets to take a shot at you. This sounds like a huge disadvantage for you at first, but the numbers given to hit usually see you needing to make a 6 or 7 to eliminate one of the enemies, while they often need to score a 10 or higher to hit you. At the end of the day I found the system generally fun, if a little too easy in my playthroughs, as I found I was rarely hit in fights, but it was still tense at times knowing that only a few hits over the course of the adventure would kill you, so that a couple of unlucky rolls in a row would probably mean disaster. I also generally tried to avoid combat where possible, as that felt the more prudent and immersive approach. In a wise move, the adventure provides two distinct ways to enter Vietnam and make your way toward the satellite crash site, with each one providing different skill checks and dangers to overcome. 

The story though, oh man! So get this, here are some of the story beats from this book:

- given a mission by former commanding officer 
- make a low-altitude nighttime parachute jump into the jungles of Vietnam
- silently stalk and kill Vietnamese soldiers in the jungles and swamps
- rendezvous with a beautiful indigenous Vietnamese woman who fights on the side of the rebels but wishes to go to America
- charter a local boat upriver where you must then overcome a heavily armed Vietnamese river patrol 
- achieve your mission objective, but learn of the presence of American POW camp in the area
- steal a Russian helicopter
- use Russian helicopter to extract all the POWs safely from the camp

Now, if you are a fan of 80's action movies and all this sounds strangely familiar, it absolutely should, as this is basically the plot of the 1985 movie "Rambo: First Blood Part 2". So much so that this can't just be a coincidence, and I would be surprised if author Mark Acres was not a big fan of the film. I mean geez, even look at the picture of the beautiful Vietnamese spy you meet up with, named Lak To, on the cover of the book....her name was Co Bao in the movie! 

At least they were wise enough not to have a shirtless muscle bound guy with a headband plastered on the cover as well, knowing that it might get them into legal trouble. On the subject of the author, I have to believe that this book was written for a teenage or even adult audience, because as you can imagine it is quite violent. The title of this book is no joke, as you move from the early stages of the adventure where you can be creeping up behind Vietnamese soldiers to slit their throats, to the final stages where you set enemy huts on fire from above, only to wait patiently for its occupants to come out screaming so that you can cut them in half with your helicopter's twin machine guns. I know these are supposed to be the "bad guys" ie. communists, you are killing here, but c'mon, some of these Vietnamese soldiers in particular are probably dirt poor and have no idea what is going on. I tried to just accept it for the Rambo-movie-in-gamebook-format it clearly is (and not the best Rambo movie either, that being the original "First Blood", which is excellent). 

This picture describes the gamebook nicely.

It was also a bit unfortunate that the opening of the adventure appears to be trying to address the issue of PTSD in Vietnam veterans, but that angle is almost completely forgotten after that first section. I do have to admit though that this book is very well written, and I found myself entertained by the writing despite some of the problems mentioned above. Another reason to believe this book may have been intended for adults is the inclusion of an essay at the back, written by a real former CIA employee apparently, that outlines the history of spy satellites and their use by militaries around the world. Basically as soon as the camera was invented, countries were using it to spy on their enemies, and we are taken along a timeline from its first usage in a hot air balloon, to the first time a guy decided to strap a camera to his biplane in World War 1, through its famous use on U-2 spy planes during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and all the way up to the 1980's where they now fly in orbit. I would normally enjoy something like this adding flavour to the adventure, but even I found this essay a snoozefest. This may be at least partly because the whole spy satellite angle in the adventure itself was really just the MacGuffin of the mission, with it having no real bearing on anything that happened, and was only there to give your character a reason to go back to Vietnam, of which several other reasons could also have been used just as well.     

It additionally needs to be said that there are some terrible reference errors here, where the sections you are sent to for passing or failing a skill check are switched around. The first time this occurred I thought  "well ok, these things happen". The second time I encountered one, it had me shaking my head. But by the fourth or fifth time this occurred I almost shouted... "Did they even give a crap?!" Fortunately these are easily overcome, and with only 150 sections in the book it's not too hard to find what section you were on, but is still very sloppy. Not only that, but right in the opening rules there is an inconsistency regarding your Combat rolls. You are told in one area that you add your current Health level to ANY Combat rolls in the adventure, so if you are currently Fit you would add +5 to any roll, Wounded would see you add +3, and Impaired +1. However, later rules then go on to give you a couple of examples of being in Combat, and this aspect about adding your Health level is completely dropped, with you only adding your Weapon and Ability scores to your rolls. Ultimately I believe that you are NOT supposed to add your Health score to the rolls, because adding +5 when you are Fit would mean most of the rolls would only require you to get a 2 to pass them, which seems ridiculous. Finally, being a TSR gamebook, there are several different "successful" endings, depending on if you managed to rescue the POW's in addition to retrieving the data banks, and also if one of those POW's happens to be your friend Wes Miller (with this being the most successful one). As usual, I kept playing until I reached this "ultimate" ending. Oh and what would a TSR gamebook be without giving you the opening option to turn down the mission and have the adventure just end right there? Count this entry as another one that includes such a choice!  

 
Ranking: This probably ended up being better than it had any right to be, and despite its faults, I mostly had fun with it. It's a bit too easy, but not ridiculously so, and provides two distinct paths to get to the satellite crash site, which helps with replayability. It has way too many brutal reference errors, and has one of the most un-original stories I have ever played through thanks to blatantly borrowing from a famous action movie (complete with the over-the-top violence), but to be fair it is also very well written, which was likely the main factor of my enjoyment in this case. This does have me wondering if all the books in the series are going to riff on a different 80's action movie, which would certainly be a way to go and make for a nostalgic series for me if nothing else. Although with different authors involved with each book, this seems doubtful. If in the next book I end up playing as a suicidal cop "on the ragged edge" who gets partnered up with another cop who is "too old for this shit", I guess I will know for sure.

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2. Blast Out in Lebanon - Score = 5.1   Tier = OK

Attempts to Beat: 1

I never thought that here in the year 2024 I would be playing a gamebook based around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but here it is. And although the book doesn't delve into it too deeply, I think it reinforces my view that the 80's were more of an "anything goes" decade than what we live in today. And as far as the subject matter itself, well I guess it just goes to show you how some things never change, as the story here would fit in just as well had it been set in 2024 as it does in 1987. In this adventure we are playing again as a freelance CIA operative, but a different individual this time in the form of Jason Malone (I assume he is that Tom Cruise looking mofo on the cover), who operates undercover as an international arms dealer. The story opens with us sitting in a quiet room with another CIA agent who of course has a mission for us. It seems that a particularly brilliant American diplomat and political science genius by the name of David Saxon has come up with a Middle East peace plan that might actually work! Apparently those in the know about such things are convinced it has a real shot at succeeding. Problem is, there are many players on all sides of the game who don't actually want peace (sound familiar?), and while Saxon was on a visit to Lebanon to meet with various officials and dignitaries, one of these players has kidnapped him. The CIA believes there hasn't been time yet for Saxon to have been smuggled out of Lebanon, so they send you there to find out who took him, where he is being held, and then either bust him out, or kill him if rescue is not possible, as he knows too many secrets at this point and will certainly be used to blackmail various groups and governments.     

This is much more of a "spy" gamebook as opposed to the "war" adventure from the previous entry, even seeing you equipped with a Fountain Pen Gun among your weapons. Other than that little gimmicky addition though, the gameplay system here is the same as the first book, so I don't have to spend any time going over that again. There is one big difference here however as it pertains to the dice rolls you need to make when required to do so. In the previous review, I mentioned that it was unclear if you were really supposed to add your Health score to your rolls, as the example given in the rules didn't mention it, and getting to add an extra 5 to every roll as long you remained unwounded seemed like overkill. Well, in this adventure you are explicitly told for each roll when you should add this Health score to your total, and you are often indeed instructed to include it. Yikes! This meant that there were several rolls in the gamebook that in order to pass I needed to roll, wait for it, a 2 or higher! (And yes, this is with two dice). In fact, most of the rolls in the gamebook seemed like foregone conclusions, and there were only half a dozen or so to make in order to win anyway. So, not only was I able to beat the adventure on my very first attempt, I did not even suffer one single hit the whole time while doing so. Because I had such an easy time of it, I did something I don't normally do, and decided to try completely playing the adventure again, except making different decisions at key moments this time. And on this attempt at it.......I ended up winning immediately again! (Although I did take one single solitary hit this time). Therein lies my biggest complaint with the book, as it is just FAR too easy. 

The story though is above average and well told. While I couldn't draw parallels to any specific movie as I could with the previous adventure, I am sure there are several elements here that can be found in various spy flicks. No sooner do you arrive at your hotel in Beirut, you have several factions immediately on your case, with some of them wanting to help you and others wanting to kill you. These factions include Israeli secret agents, Islamic Jihad and some offshoots, and of course our old buddies in the KGB. The authors, Dana Kramer and Mark Acres, appear to be attempting to not take sides here, as almost all the groups are portrayed to have both moderates who want peace and wish to help you, but also fanatics who are out to finish you and Saxon off.  Although this all probably would have been an easier sell in 1987. As such, you sneak around Beirut using your cover as an international arms dealer, gathering intel and avoiding assassination attempts, until you finally uncover the whereabouts of Saxon and must attempt to break him out and escape. There are a few decent set pieces here narratively, including a shootout in a club, an encounter with armed gunmen in the streets, and the final assault to rescue Saxon. It's just unfortunate that, as already mentioned, nothing is all that difficult to get through so there is not much tension to be found. 

No doubt about it though, this is a heavily story driven book. Much like with the "Crossroads" series, sections here can sometimes be 4 or 5 pages long (and the first section comes in at a whopping 9 pages alone). I kind of had a feeling that this would be the case even from just picking up the book, as it appeared to be the same size as the previous entry, yet contained far less sections. Thankfully though, as hinted at earlier, the writing here is again strong, and it would seem to me that Acres in particular (as he was involved with the first two books in the series now) leans more toward actual author as opposed to gamebook designer. One frustrating aspect though was that once again the book begins with an interesting angle, in this case the morality of possibly having to kill Saxon for the greater good should you not be able to rescue him, but then fails to follow through on it. Your Malone character makes it quite clear that he would have no qualms in terminating Saxon should it come to that, and indeed that he has performed such actions in the past. I thought for sure this was setting up a big choice at the end of the adventure, where the player would have to decide if they themselves could execute an innocent man, and felt this could have made for a real thought provoking ending. However, much like in the previous book, this angle is ditched immediately after being introduced, and you have no trouble at all in getting Saxon out alive.

In a final similarity to the previous adventure, this entry also contains an essay at the back of the book from that same former CIA employee as before (I guess they will all have these?). This time, we are lectured on how the life of actual spies is nothing like the glamourous life found in James Bond movies. I think we all already knew this though didn't we? Ok, perhaps maybe not when you were a kid, but these gamebooks don't seem like they are aimed at kids to begin with, containing geo-political themes and brutal violence. I did find this essay to be more entertaining than the previous one (and it was thankfully shorter), as we are given some examples of actual mercenary spies in history and how things ultimately went badly for them. The conclusion seems to be that in order to choose this as your profession, you need to be some kind of nutcase. This is somewhat in contrast to the adventure itself that we just played, as Malone is something of a jet-setting badass, but maybe the whole point was to add a bit of sobering reality.   

Ranking: With the book clocking in at only 116 sections, this means it would really have to hit it out of the park to achieve a high score. And unfortunately, it doesn't even come close to doing that. The story is better than the previous entry, I can give it that much, but in every aspect of gameplay this is a step back from that first book, and as such falls behind it in the rankings. I think the adding of your Health score to many of your rolls was a big mistake, making the adventure way too easy as a result. Once again the entertaining writing helps to save it, I just wish it had concluded by asking the tough questions.

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3. Into China - Score = 3.8   Tier = Bad

Attempts to Beat: 1

Oh brother. Well, so much for never playing a "bad" TSR published gamebook. It was a good run while it lasted at least. This entry from author Dan Greenberg sees us playing as CIA agent Marshall Hunter, who while relaxing in his adopted home of Hong Kong where he maintains a residence, is contacted via phone by his superior at the Company, a man by the name of Stansfield. It appears that an old adversary of ours from Chinese Intelligence, Lu Yuen, wishes to defect to the United States, but will only do so if we personally go to China to bring him in. This initially sounds like a fairly simple assignment, except that Yuen's intentions to defect are already known by several groups, including his own government and also the KGB, who are now attempting to assassinate him lest the vast amount of classified information he knows be passed on to the United States. You know, for a guy who is made out very early on to be a master spy, should it not have been incredibly easy for him just to show up at CIA headquarters and say "here I am"? In any case, we accept the mission and prepare to head out to meet up with an information broker who knows how to get in touch with Yuen. Unless of course we don't, as amazingly there is yet another option here to simply decline the mission, at which point the game immediately ends. I wonder if anyone who ever played these chose the "decline" option, then just put the book back on the shelf and never touched it again, because it sometimes feels like the adventure doesn't actually want you to play it. 

As it turns out, I guess this book was telling me something, and I really should have declined the mission, because this gets real bad, real quick. First of all, this adventure takes so long to get going that boredom sets in very quickly. The mission of the adventure I outlined in the paragraph above doesn't actually kick off the book. No sir, first of all you endure the opening sections at your home in Hong Kong, where you banter back and forth with your housekeeper about your upcoming vacation, then you meet up with your Tai Chi instructor in your garden who challenges you to a friendly sparring match (it turns out you are a martial arts expert). From there, a fellow CIA agent comes calling, and the two of you head back by plane to CIA Headquarters in America where you get briefed on the assignment. Incidentally, this is supposed to be incredibly top secret, so I love how you are briefed inside a conference room along with a dozen other agents who have absolutely nothing to do with this mission. Before you leave the HQ, you venture into the Research Division to check out the new gadgets that may be available to you. And here follows an incredibly awkward and poorly written encounter with "Rusty", who is essentially a female Q from the James Bond movies. She has just devised a special gadget which she calls the "Infinity Horn", which will allow you to be able to use any phone as a listening device, whether the phone happens to be in use or not. She is not authorized to just give you this highly classified device, so you "romance" it out of her in one of the more creepier sections I have ever read. Once that bit of sordid business is taken care of, and despite your reservations about having a partner as you prefer to work alone, you are paired up with another CIA agent who will be accompanying you on the assignment, and this happens to be Holden, the same guy who came to Hong Kong to get you. So now the two of you head BACK to Hong Kong to meet up with the information broker who knows how you can get in contact with Lu Yuen. All of this just drags on and on, and you will read many sections here before anything of real consequence happens. 

What say we discuss your "equipment" over dinner Double-O-Seven ? 

So you meet up with the broker, dealing with Chinese gangs and KGB agents out to kill you along the way, before learning that you will need to head "into China" (Beijing to be exact), and locate a safe house where it is thought Yuen can be found. It turns out Yuen is not at this safehouse, but his assistant is currently there being forcibly held by the Chinese gang you encountered earlier, as they await the arrival of Yuen so they can ambush and execute him. Well, Yuen is too smart to fall for that, but his assistant will no doubt have some info on where you can find Yuen, so you decide to rescue him. And here commences what must be the most ridiculous rescue sequence I have ever seen. You realize that neither a frontal assault nor a stealth approach will work in rescuing Yuen's assistant, as the gang will be ready for either of these. So you decide to just calmly walk in the front door, take the man, and then walk out again. And it actually works! This is so ludicrous in how it plays out, as the lone guard in the first room just stares at you mouth agape as you walk past him into the next room. In this next room there are five more guards, who only see you once you have walked past them into another room where Yuen's assistant is being tortured. They then all literally trip over each other in an attempt to get to you (with one of them even skewering himself on his own sword), and before they can do anything about it you are out the back door where you successfully make your escape. It is as if your character suddenly gained the superpowers of Marvel's Black Cat character, where anyone who attempts to harm her is befallen with bad luck. The book itself even refers to the guards as being like the "Keystone Cops", so maybe the author really does know how bad this is after all. Anyhow, the assistant does indeed know where you can finally find Yuen, and the adventure mercifully rushes to its conclusion, with the final meet up with Yuen only requiring a few sections. The author attempts to throw a twist to the ending here regarding the motivations of a certain character, but doesn't totally commit to it, so that I thought it ultimately fell flat.  

The game system here is the same as before, with the only real difference being the weapons you have available to you. Instead of assault rifles or grenades, this time you have only your pistol. That said, you almost never use your pistol, because as mentioned earlier you are a master martial artist, and in most cases will disarm opponents using just your hands. More to this point, the adventure is very big on the use of your Tai Chi in overcoming all obstacles, and the calmness of mind it gives you, along with the practice of not using force against your enemies, but to use their own force against them, is hammered home again and again. The adventure also includes several maps at the back of the book (as did the previous entries in the series), which depict the layout of certain places that you visit (eg. the safehouse, a restaurant, your own garden for cryin out loud). I suppose these are meant to add some flavour, and they do in some cases, although I'm not sure why they couldn't have just been included in the sections where you visit them, but they are full page maps so maybe that had something to do with it. The safehouse map is particularly amusing however, as it has a dotted line drawn on it that shows the route your character walks through the various rooms to rescue the assistant, then exit via the back door. Priceless!   

This was another adventure beaten on the first attempt with a scant amount of gameplay, and while going back to look at unexplored options reveals that there are some encounters and combats to be had here, you will likely only find yourself in many of them if you make a foolish decision. Additionally, the adventure has several choices to be made during the final act where choosing wrong leads to game over, however the options you are meant to take seemed fairly obvious. Hmmm, should you go with your gut instinct, or take the advice of your idiot partner? These are the kinds of decisions you are asked to make. The adventure then comes down to the final decision among 3 options, with the correct one feeling so obvious that I don't know why the author didn't just put "PICK ME" at the end of it.  

If it isn't apparent from the review so far, the story and writing here are big steps back from the first two books in the series. This is even more in the spy genre than the previous adventure, but it's more along the lines of David Niven than Sean Connery. Your partner, Holden, is a particularly huge problem with the adventure. He is such a complete and insufferable moron that it beggars belief how he even ties his shoes let alone became a top agent at the CIA. Your superior, Stansfield, doesn't fare much better, as he is portrayed as a naive and bumbling fool, although at least in his case he is hardly in the adventure. And then of course there is your sex-crazed gadget whiz Rusty, who, and just for a sample, actually has this exchange with you: 

Rusty: "How's the undercover world?"
Marshall: "Excellent"
Rusty: "Then why haven't you invited me under covers?" 

Ranking: I mentioned in the review for the previous adventure that the story and writing helped to save it. Well, Into China has neither of those. I am really struggling to find anything positive to say about it. I suppose if you view it as a comedy gamebook you might get a chuckle out of how bad most of the story is and how ridiculous some of the characters are, I just don't think that was intentional. The fact that it was so easy to beat works in its favour in this case too, and there were no frustrating gameplay moments, so that is something. However the adventure is very linear, which is not a good thing in this case, as despite having the fewest sections of any in the series so far at 104, this book was a chore to get through. Halfway through the series and it isn't faring all that well in my opinion, although it still has a few entries left to turn it around. One can only hope!  

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4. KGB Doublecross - Score = 1.3   Tier = Yikes!

Attempts to Beat: 6 (I think? Maybe?)

What a mess! If anything, these last two entries have cast the first two books of the series in a much better light, because KGB Doublecross is an atrocious piece of game design. The story isn't good either, although it is difficult to be subjective about it while struggling to overcome the litany of mechanical problems with the adventure. That story in this book sees you playing as Lukas Grey, a CIA freelance operative who poses as an international arms dealer, and who must help a Polish agent defect to the United States. So, we are only on book 4, but already are recycling the same cover that you had in book 2, and have a similar objective as in book 3. There are thankfully some other objectives here, as not only do we need to break into KGB Headquarters (yeah, right!) to rescue the defecting Polish agent, named Orlewski, who has been captured by the Soviets, but we must also steal back plans to the US Cruise missile system that Orlewski was carrying upon his detainment. In addition, Orlewski was captured because of a mole within the CIA, so we must also uncover who this double agent is and expose them. So the goal here is threefold, and it's off to Moscow we go in order to: a) rescue Orlewski, b) retrieve the stolen missile plans, and c) uncover the mole within the CIA. 

This adventure goes even more heavily into the realm of James Bond than the previous book, and kicks off with a "pre-title action sequence" that has nothing to do with the rest of the book. This initial sequence involves you trying to reclaim a canister of microfilm that has been stolen by two enemy agents as you pursue them into the German Alps. This isn't a bad idea at all, and could help to introduce your character as the badass action hero that he is supposed to be. I say it could introduce him that way, but not necessarily, because author Matthew J. Costello takes a page out of another adventure he would write, that being the Daredevil book from the "Marvel Super Heroes" series, in that I believe this whole sequence is impossible to fail. For example, you can be asked to make a Skill check to see if you can shoot the tires out on the fleeing car of the bad guys, and should you pass the check you successfully hit the tire, and the car then goes careening off the road and over a cliff, where it crashes in a fiery explosion, thus destroying the microfilm which counts as mission accomplished. What happens should you fail the Skill check and miss the tires? Well, the fleeing car then skids on a patch of ice.....and goes over the cliff, where it crashes in a fiery explosion, thus destroying the microfilm which counts as mission accomplished. I'm more forgiving of this kind of thing here to be honest, as this whole sequence is just a set-up for your character's personality and skills, but the downside of this is that you can do everything wrong and still complete your goal, which makes you feel more like Inspector Gadget than the master spy you are supposed to be. It also starts to wear thin quickly when you have to replay the adventure several times, knowing that there is no point to any of this.   

After this opening sequence, you have a secret rendezvous with your CIA handler, who gives you the rundown on the objectives I mentioned above. As it happens, your handler has secured you a job within a travelling circus that is about to leave for a performance in Moscow, and you will join them to act as one of the performers that catches the acrobats after their aerial routines. The whole international arms dealer thing never comes up again at all, but luckily for you, your character has some previous background as a gymnast in school. This whole travelling circus thing, where you meet all of its members and try to decide who among them you can trust, is dull as hell, and goes on for far too long. The 80's spy movie aspect of the story does come out at one point here though in the form of the lead tumbler of the circus, a beautiful dark-haired woman called Silvana. As soon as the author started talking about her beauty, I could see what was coming, and despite the fact that she initially regards you with disdain, sure enough there is a flirtatious section where she catches you coming out of the shower and admires your goods (with your towel on of course).

Once you finally make it to Moscow, you then need to find a way inside KGB Headquarters, which is located in Red Square. Much like the safehouse rescue sequence from the previous book, how you make it inside this building is ridiculous. Using a tip from one of your contacts, you learn that a department store also located in Red Square contains an airshaft in its basement that leads directly to the basement of the KGB Headquarters. You gotta be kidding me. Probably one of the most top secret, heavily guarded buildings in the world, and you are going to enter via an airshaft large enough for a person to fit through that leads to an empty storeroom in the Headquarters basement that is totally unguarded? C'mon! Not only that, but how you enter the department building itself is one of the more overly dramatic moments you will find. In order to get inside, you must climb up a fire escape, where you will then enter on an upper floor and make your way to the basement. There is a three page long section describing your attempt to leap up and grab the bottom rung of this fire escape. The book even describes how "you jump, and for a moment you are in midair". (Isn't that how jumping works?) I mean, what happens if you don't grab the fire escape successfully? Wouldn't you just try again? Now, once you manage to grab on, there ARE a couple of patrolling policeman coming down the alley that are supposed to add tension, but the whole thing felt quite silly, as you hang above them hoping the sweat from your nose doesn't land on them, thus alerting them to your presence. (I would say this is a parody of a similar moment in the first "Mission Impossible" movie, if this book hadn't come out first). 

After you get inside the KGB building, you encounter a beautiful KGB officer, and once again, you know exactly what is going to happen with her eventually don't you? All that these ladies that you meet are missing are names like Alotta Fagina. The sequence inside the Headquarters is mercifully short, with something amusing dawning on your character as he searches the computer database for the Cruise missile plans. While doing so he realizes that, wouldn't they have made several copies of these plans by now? Why yes, yes they would have. You just thought of this now? Anyway, that is at least one of the 3 objectives that you no longer have to worry about, and must now only concern yourself with rescuing Orlewski and discovering the identity of the CIA mole. One useful thing you DO learn is that Orlewski is no longer being held at the Headquarters, and has been transferred to a remote northern Russian Naval base. Only one thing for it then, as you commandeer a jet plane at a nearby airfield, and along with an ally you pick up along the way, head north to the base. This sequence where you travel in the jet and have to contend with 3 MiG fighter jets that are trying to shoot you down, along with the final assault on the naval base to rescue Orlewski, are easily the best parts of the adventure, although that isn't saying much. The dogfight sequence in particular could have been something great, as at one point you actually get to choose what maneuver you wish to attempt, but it ultimately comes down to what I thought was a very easy combat. You only have to eliminate 2 of the 3 MiGs following you, but you are told your plane can take 4 hits before crashing, which makes it a bit of a cakewalk. I do wonder though why you are told to add YOUR Firing modifier to your dice rolls, because it is made clear that it is your ally that is doing all the firing at the MiG's, as you are solely flying the plane. 

"Take us down Smithers!"

"Uh, YOU'RE flying the plane sir."

I will say that the final assault on the remote and icy naval base was atmospheric, and included a map at the back of the book which shows the layout of the base itself that helped greatly with the immersion. Once you successfully rescue Orlewski, who has been given quite the beating by his Russian captors, he reveals to you the name of the CIA mole that betrayed him. You and he then get back in your plane and fly to Finland, and from there rustle up passage on a freighter heading to the United States. When you arrive back at CIA Headquarters in Virginia, you expose the mole (who of course doesn't go quietly, and you have one final confrontation to get through), and you have then achieved victory. I mentioned earlier that the book began with a very James Bond-ish pre-title action sequence, and it also concludes in similar Bond fashion, with one of the beautiful women you met earlier showing up at your hotel room for a "debriefing", as it were. I could almost hear the 007 theme in my head at this point.       
While certainly not good, this all doesn't sound that bad so far right? Why then did this adventure get such an abysmal score from me? One big reason. The reference errors here are off the charts! It was bad enough in book 1 of the series when I came across 4 or 5 Skill checks where the positive and negative results were switched around from what they should have been based upon the required numbers to roll, but in this adventure there are at least 3 times as many of these! There must be at least 15 of these Skill checks (and probably more), where you will pass the check only to go to the indicated section where you then read how you actually FAILED in what you were attempting to do, and either suffer damage, or if this happens a couple of times in a row, could lead to game over. At first I thought maybe ok, in that several of the rolls you are told not to add any modifiers, which in essence makes them completely random rolls, so it would not be unheard of for the lower random outcome to be the positive one, but this brief theory gets destroyed because these reference errors also occur when you are told to add your modifiers based upon your current Health and/or Stealth level as well. To make things even worse, it is not always readily apparent if the section you are sent to is the correct one or not, because the outcome of what you were attempting to accomplish in the Skill check might not be revealed for another 1 or 2 sections. I spent so much time playing this trying to figure out which of the references I was REALLY supposed to go to, that by the time I made it inside the KGB Headquarters, I had completely forgotten what I had come there to do! 

While the above reason is the biggie for the low score, there are other reasons as well. One of them is that there are very few decisions to be made here, with just about everything determined by dice roll, and many of them totally random to boot. The most common ending to a section you read will tell you to "Make a COMBAT roll adding no modifiers. If you score 7 or less turn to X. If you score 8 or more turn to Y." This makes the vast majority of what happens completely out of your control. Heck, there is even at least one case where a random roll determines how your character "feels" about a certain situation! The roll doesn't impact what actually happens, just what your character thinks about it. Isn't this taking it just a wee bit too far? There is also what we are led to believe early on is an incredibly important item, that being an attache case you get from your handler before heading off to join the circus. This attache case contains explosives and heat-seeking bullets (do bullets work that way?), that sure sound like they will be important later. Now, you can lose this attache case in a key moment and then must continue on without it. However, I found it far better to actually lose the case, as there are times later where just having it discovered on you can cost you the adventure, and it turns out you don't need it for anything anyway. This got me thinking about any other gamebooks out there where it turns out you are better of NOT having what is made out to be a key item.  

I also have to say that I found the writing here to be very stilted and unnatural. There are a lot of sentences containing only a few words, which for me made most of the sections a slog to get through, as I am used to taking a pause for a second when I come to the end of a sentence. Combine this with the adventure being extremely linear, along with it coming it at the highest section count of the series so far at 174, and this was yet another adventure that was a chore to read through. It's a shame too, because an adventure set in Cold War era Russia, in the dead of winter no less, with its frozen tundra, endless pine forests, snow covered Moscow streets, grey bleak skies, and the pervasive feeling of paranoia found in every corner, could have made for a great setting. Too bad it is totally wasted here. The book then concludes with another one of the essays that were seen at the ends of books 1 and 2 (but which was absent in book 3, and I have to admit I didn't even notice that fact at the time, as the adventure was so bad), with this essay being a very short one about the history of KGB activities within the United States. This is written by the same former CIA employee again, although this time I'm not sure why he even bothered, as this goes into no detail at all regarding known historical KGB agents operating on US soil (other than a brief mention of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg), which is unfortunate, as there are probably some interesting stories to be told here. As it stands, the essay is very generic and is easily the worst of them so far. Which is fitting I suppose, having the worst essay alongside the worst adventure.      

Ranking: The crazy amount of reference errors make this a complete disaster. How does something like this make it to publication? Imagine an author turning in a novel to their publisher where the chapters were all mixed up and out of order. Wouldn't fly right? Yet somehow this makes it through. I have to believe it's because publishers didn't really know how gamebooks worked (nor cared to learn), so just assumed it was all correct without the need for double checking. That doesn't explain how the author allowed this to happen though, and Costello should be ashamed of this. This adventure is some kind of love child between the "Real Life" and "Virgin Adventure" series, with many pointless decisions (or rolls in lieu of decisions), along with an absolute crap-ton of errors. It is so bad in that latter aspect that this must surely be in contention for the all-time gamebook with the most reference errors in it. Far and away the worst in the series so far, and with each entry having gotten worse as I have gone along, I am dreading what is in store for me next.

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5. ULTRA Deadly - Score = 3.6   Tier = Bad

Attempts to Beat: 17

Well, this series certainly is crashing and burning right before my very eyes. While not as terrible as the previous entry, this book is pretty bad in its own right, although for different reasons. Right out of the chute though, my initial impressions were positive, as I quickly learned that unlike the previous books in the series which were all set during the Cold War period of the 80's, this one is a World War 2 set adventure. This automatically bought the book some goodwill from me, as I feel that WW2 is prime real estate for many wonderful gamebook opportunities, and yet the only adventures I have played set in this period so far are Through the Wire from the "Real Life" series, which was I think one of the better entries from that range, and Escape From Colditz from the "Virgin Adventure" series, which is awful. The action here kicks off immediately too as right in the first section we find our character, John Canaan, an American spy undercover in France, galloping on horseback through the French countryside while being pursued by two German soldiers in a jeep, our undercover disguise apparently now blown. In this first section, we are given 4 different directions as to how we wish to attempt to lose the Germans chasing us, with most of these options eventually leading us, after some possible Skill checks, to a run-down farmhouse where we take cover in the barn. Inside the barn, we meet a beautiful French girl (and yes, once again you can see where this is going), who agrees to help hide us. However, the German soldiers enter the barn looking for us, and then attempt to rape the girl, at which point we have no choice but to intervene, being the dashing hero that we are. Once we have dispatched the soldiers, we successfully make it back to England, where none other than Winston Churchill himself wishes to speak with us inside his war room in London. This whole opening sequence was well written and exciting, and at this point my hopes for the adventure were high. But that feeling didn't last long, because oh boy the two sequences that follow this opening are totally abysmal. 

Next comes the meeting with Churchill, accompanied by General Menzies who is the head of MI-6, and as a reader you better hunker down for a ridiculously long run of exposition. The stretch of "turn to" sections here is insane! I was having Prisoners of Time from the "Lone Wolf" series flashbacks, and if you have read that book with its long stretches of exposition, you will know what I am talking about. I think it might be even worse here though, because most of these sections go on for several pages each, and Churchill keeps repeating himself (yes I get it, what you are telling us is super top-secret, just get on with it already!), and he takes forever to get to the bloody point. This all could have been handled far more succinctly than what we got, and makes me wonder if author Neil Randall was being paid by the word count. It is at this point that I also must mention something that could happen to a reader way back in the first section. I mentioned earlier that in that initial section you are given 4 different directions to choose in an attempt to lose the soldiers chasing you. Now, one of these four directions has you skip the farmhouse sequence completely, and just immediately sends you to the war room meeting with Churchill and Menzies. This eventually ends up being a boon to the player on repeated playthroughs, allowing you to quickly bypass this whole opening act, but still, any reader who chose that specific direction first time out would end up reading this book for 20 minutes without having to roll any dice or even make any kind of decision, which would likely have them wondering just what the hell kind of "gamebook" they have stumbled onto here. During this meeting itself, you learn that the British have something called ULTRA, which is the name given to their combined code-breaking efforts, mainly centered around Bletchley Park, and their decoding of German Enigma machine messages. ULTRA has allowed them to completely break the German codes, which means the British are always one step ahead of the Nazi's, often knowing the enemies plans before they have even been relayed to the front line soldiers. However, it seems as though a German spy has managed to discover the existence of ULTRA, and is even now thought to be attempting to flee Britain in order to alert his superiors in Nazi Germany. Should he succeed in escaping, the Nazi's will surely devise a new code system, and the current advantage of ULTRA will be lost. Churchill has chosen you personally to locate this spy and prevent him from passing on this information, because with you being an American and the mission itself to take place on British soil, it is less likely that you will be recognized or have your cover blown.  

Once the Churchill meeting mercifully ends (and this is akin to a 45 minute cutscene that you are forced to sit through while playing a video game), you finally get control of your character back and get to make decisions again. Except that you really don't, as you now begin yet another terribly designed sequence. Here you leave London and head straight for Coventry, the last known location of the German spy, in an attempt to pick up any clues as to his whereabouts. Once in Coventry, you meet up with an MI-6 agent who has been instructed to help you (and for some reason he is drawn like a vampire in one of the illustrations, what the heck is that about? Did the artist think this was a typical fantasy gamebook?), and you then start your investigation. At first this feels like it could involve a good bit of sleuthing, but a major problem quickly rears its ugly head. All throughout this Coventry sequence you are routinely given a choice between two courses of investigation, with one of them always being to check out a particular location. You will likely go to this location at least once, at which point you will discover that it is a game over section, as going here means you have wasted too much time and the spy has escaped. This means that on every playthrough after this, you know not to check out this location, which then results in there being almost no decisions at all to be made here, as you will routinely have no choice but to pick the other option! This must be one of the most rail-roady stretches of gamebook play that you will find, and you are asked if you want to visit this game-over location so many times that I began to think this was some kind of joke. There are even Skill checks in this sequence, that if failed, also send you to this game over location! Good grief! This sequence in Coventry also sees you yet again rescuing a girl from being raped by two German agents, and this author is clearly not afraid to portray sexual violence in a gamebook, as I also recall this aspect from another book of his, that being Storm of Dust from the "Crossroads" series. This Coventry portion of the gamebook eventually ends when we learn who the spy is and where they are headed (Portsmouth), and we then travel on to the next area.

The trip to Portsmouth is something of an odd duck for a couple of reasons. First, it is here that the author appears to want to cram in whatever offhand remarks he can about the towns that you pass through on the way, with your character even stopping at Oxford despite the obvious urgency of the mission because he can't resist checking out the university there. For the most part I will say that this book is well written overall, although there are times like these when Randall seems to be trying just a bit too hard. There is another example that comes later for instance, where when impersonating a Canadian soldier, not only does he throw a typical Canadian "eh" at the end of a statement, but he then calls attention to how clever that was. Anyhow, another odd moment occurs on the trip when, travelling by car, you find yourself being followed by an enemy agent on the road. This agent eventually runs your car off the road, at which point he then just bolts, and you get back in your car and then find yourself chasing HIM. We find out that this agent was under orders to kill you, so then why did he just make a run for it before finishing the job? And if your character was not afraid of this guy following you, as he is clearly shown not to be, then why were we running from him in the first place? It is as if there is a very strange game of tag being played here, and I suspect this set of circumstances only exists so that there are a couple of different car chases to be had, one with you as the pursued and the other as the pursuer.    

Once that enemy agent is taken care of, we arrive at Portsmouth where we track the spy to a Canadian army barracks, and must then assume the identity of a Canadian soldier ourselves as mentioned earlier so that we can attempt to root him out. Before we even get a chance to look for the spy though, we are roused in the early morning and are sent to board ships in the harbour. Wait, could it be? Yes it is, we are actually going to get to participate in the D-Day landings! As dissatisfied as I was with the adventure up until this point, this was a great idea for inclusion, as we get our own "Saving Private Ryan" sequence. The trip across the Channel and the storming of the beaches is mostly done narratively though, with not much gameplay involved, although this is still the high point of the adventure, with you finally locating the spy you have been chasing, and then have a final fight with him right in the middle of the invasion. It's a shame there isn't more gameplay involved here though, because should you happen to have a particular item on you, it can lead to an automatic win without even requiring you to roll any dice. It's probably a 50/50 proposition that you will still have this item, and should you not have it, you will need to pass a final Skill check to win, and this final check isn't a gimme. Once the spy is defeated you have one final moral choice to make, in whether you want to kill him or let him live, but in either case you have won the adventure and prevented the Germans from finding out about ULTRA, and are personally congratulated by Winston Churchill himself back in London. The book then concludes with another "essay", although this time it is in the form of an interview with a former Colonel who was privy to the real ULTRA during World War 2. 

This book was far and away the hardest of the series so far, and this is mainly due to several random rolls that must be made in order to win. Now, individually these rolls are all slightly in your favour (ie. roll a 7 or higher to pass), so you might feel good about your chances. However, rolling a 7 or higher on two dice is one thing, but when you need to do that a few times, with any roll under 7 meaning failure, that can become frustrating. You know you will eventually get there of course, but following a routine of : "Passed the first check....dang, failed the second one, start over. Passed the first check....passed the second check....dang, failed the third one, start over. Failed the first check, start over. Failed the second check, start over. Failed the first check again, start over" obviously grows tiresome after a point. It is precisely for this adventure that the Experience Point system found in other TSR series such as "Marvel Super-Heroes" and "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons" is badly needed. Acquiring points by performing heroic actions, such as saving the women from being raped for example, that you can then spend to help out with essential rolls once you have identified which ones they were, would add a wonderful layer of strategy and encourage more thorough exploration. I wonder why this Experience Point aspect was omitted from this series? You would think these things would get more refined with each passing year, not less. 

This adventure also ditches the combat system that had been used up to this point. In previous entries, you were given the "to hit" values for both yourself and your enemy and rolled against that to see who hit who in each round, with you only needing one hit to defeat them, and your enemy needing to bring your Health Level down to Incapacitated in order to win. Here though, the combats are straight up Skill checks, usually using either your Firing or Hand to Hand modifier depending on the situation. Pass the check and you win the fight. Fail the check and you don't, and then either lose the adventure, or in some cases you might get one more attempt to pass another check before the failure kicks in. It makes it even more curious then that this adventure also adds another Health Status Level, so now it is: Fit, Weakened, Wounded, Impaired, Incapacitated. In other words, you now need to suffer 4 hits of damage to be knocked out of the game as opposed to 3, although once again I'm not sure why the author even bothered, because I am not sure it's even possible to suffer 4 hits of damage in the adventure, because it doesn't use the previously established combat system, and the failures in the book almost all come from making a bad choice or failing a Skill check. Also, much like in the previous adventure, random rolls determine a lot of what happens here, especially in the final third of the book. The adventure tries to make it SEEM like it isn't random by having you add a modifier to the roll, but if there is no way to either gain or lose points off of these modifiers in the course of the book, and with the author setting the value required in order to pass the roll, isn't that then just as random as asking you to roll two dice and add no modifiers? (Which the adventure also does a lot of by the way). Thank goodness at least that this entry is mostly free of the reference errors that plagued the last book, and I only recall coming across one, although that one was quite the doozy, with both section references given for a choice leading to other sections that made absolutely no sense and were obviously incorrect. Not much I could do in this case except backtrack and pick another earlier option, and thankfully this botched section was not on the required path.       

That all being said, there is one particular thing I would like to praise this adventure for, that being a clue that can be discovered very early on in the book that has no relevance until much later. This clue can be found inside the barn of the farmhouse during the opening sequence, but could easily be missed. Even should you find it however, it initially makes absolutely no sense, and almost no attention is called to it, with it being mentioned in one sentence before the adventure forgets about it and carries on. I had almost completely forgotten about it by the time I finally made it to the endgame of the book. However, should you have been paying attention to a story the farmgirl told you, it will all tie in together and make sense right at the very end of the mission, when you need to decide which of the D-Day beaches you should head toward in trying to find the spy. This kind of thing is low-key brilliant, and I wish we saw more of it in gamebooks (Slaves of the Abyss from "Fighting Fantasy" did this particularly well), where the author allows you to put two-and-two together for yourself so that you may have that Eureka moment without having a neon sign which says "THIS IS AN IMPORTANT CLUE!" with a big arrow pointing towards it. (And that for some reason always reminds me of a certain "Blackadder" scene). Unfortunately.........this whole idea is somewhat betrayed during this final choice, as I felt even if you didn't find the clue and realized what it meant, you only have two options of beaches to choose from, and the one you need to take felt to me like it was given away by the way the choice was worded. Even if it hadn't been, you would still have a 50/50 chance of just guessing right. A pity that this great clue inclusion was undermined this way. But I probably shouldn't be surprised. 

"This is a crisis. A large crisis. In fact, if you've got a moment, it's a twelve-storey crisis with a magnificent entrance hall, carpeting throughout, 24-hour portage, and an enormous sign on the roof, saying 'This Is a Large Crisis'. A large crisis requires a large plan. Get me two pencils and a pair of underpants."

Ranking: To quote "The Police", I'm sending out an SOS. This range is indeed quickly going the route of the "Real Life" series in terms of both its gameplay and overall quality. ULTRA Deadly is neck and neck for me with Into China in the series rankings, and while I prefer the setting in this adventure, and can admit that it does have a brief area or two where it shines, this is too little too late, and is not nearly enough to rescue it from all its other problems. Therefore I have to give the slight edge to Into China, as at least that felt more like a gamebook, bad as it also was. The good news is I only have one more of these in the series to go! The bad news is, I still have one more of these in the series to go.  

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6. Libyan Strike - Score = 5.8   Tier = OK

Attempts to Beat: 3

Well what do you know, one of those rare series where it ends on a high note. Or, at least a high note as compared to all that came before it. This final adventure returns to the 1980's time period and sees us playing as Michael Monroe, a relatively fresh recruit of the CIA who currently works undercover at his job in New York as an interpreter for the United Nations. The story opens with terrorist bombs going off in Washington, London, and the United Nations complex, of which Monroe survives. While the previous books in the series kept the bad guys nebulously fictitious in terms of actual individuals, this adventure doesn't hesitate in going real world, as we learn these terrorist bombers are originating from Libya, and are personally being sent by Muammar Gaddafi, who was the military dictator of that country at the time. Thanks to our ability to speak fluent Arabic, we are one of three operatives chosen to infiltrate Libya and discover the top secret location of the specific terrorist camp from where these bombers are being trained. Our role in the mission, code name Mad Dog, is to commandeer a luxury yacht in the Gulf of Sidra owned by an American arms dealer that comes complete with an advanced communications system. We are then to await contact from the other two agents, a British spy by the name of Jack Westerfield, and a legendary Israeli agent called Zi Menahim, who are inserted at different areas within Libya in order to search out the terrorist camp location. When one of them finds it, they are to contact us by radio, where we will then use the communications system aboard the yacht to contact an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean Sea, which will then launch a squadron of F-15's to destroy the camp. I'm sure this will all go off without a hitch! 

As expected, it doesn't take long for the mission to go sideways, as after a fun sequence where you make your way out to the yacht and kill the murderous gunrunner aboard it, you are not on the ship for 10 minutes when Libyan patrol boats swoop in on you and you are taken away to a meeting with a nefarious Libyan general. This opening is well told, but going back to check unexplored options and what would happen on failed dice rolls, there doesn't appear to be any way to fail this yacht sequence. After that opening to the adventure, it here does something that always ticks me off in gamebooks. You go to the meeting with this general pretending to be the gunrunner that you killed earlier, and must make several dice checks and key choices as to how to handle the encounter, with the idea being to bluff your way through without it being discovered who you really are. Problem is, there is no way to make it through this without being found out and captured. I always dislike these "you are going to be captured no matter what you do" areas, because all the thought you are supposed to be putting into your actions makes not a whit of difference. You might as well just give me an option to immediately surrender as soon as I get there, so that I can just get on with the adventure. Anyway, you are captured, put on trial for being a spy, found guilty, sentenced to death, and then of course escape overnight. (How many bad guys in fiction must be kicking themselves for insisting on executing their enemies at dawn?). 

After fleeing into the desert with the aid of a young local boy and his teenage sister, you soon learn that your fellow agents appear to have failed, and should you wish for the mission to be successful, you are going to have to locate the terrorist camp and destroy it yourself, because you also learn that the camp has sophisticated Soviet-made anti-aircraft systems which would shoot down any assault made by the F-15's out on the aircraft carrier. This searching for the camp, and the manner of its destruction, makes for some good intense action, and I enjoyed reading through it. I say reading through it, because the "turn to" sections start to rear their ugly head again at times, and even the skill checks you are required to make are often heavily in your favour, although I was reminded the hard way that nothing is guaranteed. To that last point, I really should have beaten this adventure on my second attempt, as the very last skill check of the book saw me only requiring to roll a 3 or higher to pass it. I then found myself staring dumbfounded at the dice for a good many seconds, as those cursed cubes had come up showing double 1's, which of course led to death and mission failure. I'm sure there are some other gamebook players out there that can relate to this kind of thing. I mean, we need the randomness in gamebooks to exist to a certain degree of course, but such a "bad beat" like that can be tough to take. This would have been much tougher to take with a 400+ section gamebook obviously, and fortunately here it is not hard at all to get back to this final roll, and with the small number of sections in the book, doesn't take very long either. Thankfully my luck wasn't so bad that I would roll double 1's again, and my character was successfully able to blow up the camp's munitions stores, destroying the camp completely, and presumably, stopping the flow of terrorist bombers. Although it obviously wouldn't really accomplish that now would it?  

This is likely going to be the shortest review of the series, mainly because at only 92 sections, this is the shortest book in the range. Full value to author S. Spano however for making the most of it, and the writing here, while perhaps not quite as good as the first two books in the series, is still very good in its own right, and I found the adventure to be a very enjoyable "action movie" story.  There are four main parts here: the taking over of the yacht (exciting but apparently un-loseable); the meeting with the Libyan general and subsequent escape (very annoying); the searching for the enemy camp (the longest and best part of the adventure with some very good plot twists); and the final destruction of the camp (again well told, but far too brief and requiring almost nothing of the player).  All the characters you meet are fleshed out well and a nice job is done in making them all come to life. Your growing friendship with the young boy, who proves himself a valuable if annoying ally is a strong point, although there is the odd moment with his 16 year old sister that borders on creepiness, but thankfully Spano knows enough to not go too far down that road. Although I suppose there would be nothing unusual about such a relationship in the part of the world where this story takes place. There is also a moment where you find a Nazi tank half-buried in the sand, and despite it having been sitting there abandoned for over 40 years, you find it still operates, and not only drive it but fire its cannon as well. This strains credulity a bit, but I found myself willing to let it slide, viewing the adventure through that "action movie" lens. The book does however employ a shifting perspective at times, where we are put in the shoes of fellow agent Jack Westerfield, or of the local boy who is helping us, even though our character is not present at these moments. I have always found these sections in gamebooks somewhat jarring. If "YOU are Michael Monroe" as the book states, why would I have first hand knowledge of what other characters are experiencing, sometimes with them even being hundreds of miles away? The book then concludes with one more essay, this time on how real world spies are actually sent to infiltrate foreign countries and the rigorous training and study they must undergo. It doesn't cover anything you wouldn't expect, although it does at least provide some actual (apparently) examples of spies being tripped up because of some innocent oversight. This essay is not attributed to anyone so far as I can tell, so I assume it was also written by Spano. 

Ranking: The best story in the series, and it isn't even close. There really isn't a lot of gameplay to be found here however, which is a common issue with this series, although in this adventure it probably provides just enough to get by. This was another example of being contrary to my preconceived notion that more sections should mean a better gamebook, with this being number 1 in my series rankings despite it having the fewest amount of sections. This also appears to be the only gamebook ever written by this author, which is too bad, because there was at least a glimmer of promise here, certainly from a story-telling standpoint anyway. It might have seemed a little better than it actually was considering the 3 books that preceded it, but this was a mostly enjoyable, if unspectacular, conclusion to this overall sub-par series.