Literature / Space Assassin

Aren't you a little short for a Stormtrooper?

Space Assassin is the 12^th entry of the Fighting Fantasy series of Gamebooks, written by Andrew Chapman, his first contribution to the series and is the franchise' second foray into the science-fiction genre after Starship Traveller.

With the previous sci-fi based adventure being a Star Trek-ish Space Opera, the follow-up, Space Assassin delves towards the more action-packed Space Hero archetype, inspired by Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Jedi Knights and similar series popular at the time. In this adventure, you are a Space Assassin skilled "in the martial arts of twenty-seven different human and alien species," who must hunt down the Mad Scientist Cyrus, whose horrific experiments on his powerful, impenetrable vessel, the Vandervecken, have long threatened your home world — and his next experiment will be the planet's last.

Besides the stats of SKILL, STAMINA and LUCK, you are granted a new stat called ARMOUR: it reflects the protection your suit can provide you against gunfire and defenses. During laser battles, your armor is expected to go down rather rapidly, should you end up in a fierce shootout against more than 5 opponents (yes, it can happen) and soon you'll see that your armor is the only thing preventing your body from becoming a crisp when being shot at by 6 defense turrets.

Of course, no sci-fi action-adventure would be complete without the cool gadgets and armaments every sci-fi hero of the '80s are frequently shown armed to the teeth with. You begin your adventure with possibly an Electric Lash, an Assault Blaster, grenades, gravity bombs, and you can uncover more powerful equipment while infiltrating the Vandervecken.

Combining the then-new formula of a space setting with the previously-used, tried-and-true Fighting Fantasy formula of dungeon crawling and exploration, Space Assassin feels closer to The Warlock of Firetop Mountain or The Citadel of Chaos, only it happens to be in a sci-fi setting. Every familiar sci-fi trope at the time is present, including laser gun battles, robotic soldiers, cryo-pods, escaping a self-destructing ship, mecha-suits, ridiculous alien species and the like. It does however allows readers to seriously play with the fully destructive capabilities of high-tech weapons and enjoy what its like to be a trigger-happy Space Assassin.

---

Space Assassin provides examples of:

• Actionized Sequel: Compared to Starship Traveller, where thanks to the mechanics it was usually best to avoid fighting whenever possible, you get to shoot, kill and destroy aplenty.
• Armor Is Useless: Zig-zagged. If you get hit, there's an armor test to see if you were hurt. So if you have an armor rating of above 12, you can't be hurt. But your armor is ablative — each test reduces your armor and if you were unlucky enough to roll a poor armor rating — well... better than nothing... slightly.
• Artificial Outdoors Display: A big part of the ship's devoted to an artificial plains/jungle environment, complete with a little village. It's seemingly there to give Cyrus the chance to see how his mutated creations behave in the wild.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • The Pan Dimensional Homing Device opens a dimensional portal that can instantly banish one enemy immediately facing you, but every time you use it you'll need to forfeit one unit of your weapon, grenades, equipment or 4 points of your armour. And while it can be used on some encounters, unfortunately you cannot use it against Cyrus in the Final Boss battle, or else risk getting yourself killed on the spot. Attempting to use it on all seventy-seven Spheres of Annihilation results in the device's manufacturers foreclosing your account and transporting you to a featureless void, since you cannot possibly hope to ever repay the value of the Spheres.
  • The Assault Blaster is usually far more damaging than the Electric Lash, however it's three times the cost and more importantly it's commonly used by your enemies so you can simply loot one of them. You may be better off just buying the Electric Lash, spend the money you saved on extra grenades or armor and kill the first unskilled thug in your way to get their Assault Blaster.
  • In the room where you fight the Razor Disc, you can find a suit of Battle Armor. It has a great armour rating of 14 but it reduces your Skill by 1 if you wear it. Best to avoid it unless your own armor is truly awful.
• Bad Boss: It turns out Cyrus isn't really nice to his employees, as you found out if you try talking to one of his technicians. In fact it's usually best to be honest about why you're there if you get the option, because that'll let you avoid some fights and gain some surprising allies, since the people who work for Cyrus generally hate him.
• Battle Bolas: One of the many weapons wielded by the Deity enemy.
• Big Red Button: One on a safe which can blow you up if you press it!
• Body Horror: Many of Cyrus's experiments are this trope.
• Brandishment Bluff: The rather surprising result of trying to use a case of ball bearings against some security guards: the assassin pretends to be a cackling maniac carrying a bomb.
• Chekhov's Gun: En route to the Final Battle, you'll be reminded if you've befriended one of Cyrus's robots, or not. If you have, the robot will stall its leader's escape, allowing you to catch up, otherwise Cyrus would escape and you would've failed your mission.
• The Computer Is a Lying Bastard: At one point, a dying NPC gives you intruction that might come into play in the floor tiles puzzle. If you follow his instructions you will get killed, meaning the game just gives you a wrong clue and there are no other clues to help you besides that the solution has nothing to do with the tiles' numbers. You have nine possible ways, so you still can make it with Trial-and-Error Gameplay and this puzzle is avoidable if you choose another path (however in the other path is very difficult too).
• Deadly Disc: At one point you can get into a room with an automated Razor Disc that flies at you with deadly accuracy.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: Getting cornered by half a dozen turrets or security robots. If you don't have a grenade you can use, you're in for a world or pain!
• Defeat Equals Explosion: If you defeat the Deity in battle, it will collapse and explode a few seconds later.
• Enemy Eats Your Lunch: After disposing of some guards, you can take a detour to a kitchen and help yourself to some snacks and quick STAMINA gain.
• The Enemy Weapons Are Better: You have to buy a gun before you play the game, a pistol or an assault rifle that can do up to three times as much damage. How much you have to spend on weapons is determined by random die roll, though, and most players will buy the pistol and then just take the option to claim a free rifle off a defeated low-Skill security robot, which are easy to run into early in the book.
• Evil Overlord: Cyrus isn't just a lone madman, he's the Od Sector's "tyrannical ruling scientist".
• Evilutionary Biologist: Cyrus has no qualms abducting innocent life forms from planets for his own experiments.
• Feed It a Bomb: The Toroid can be destroyed instantly if you fling a gravity bomb into its mouth.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: You are explicitly described as being skilled with no fewer than 27 different martial arts, yet you have the same range of combat stats as almost every other Fighting Fantasy protagonist.
• Gas Mask Mooks: Cyrus' human guards are these, as shown on the front cover.
• Giant Spider: You find one of these in a cryo-pod. Surprisingly, given the usual FF assumptions, this spider is actually friendly, and can give you a valuable item if you don't attack him.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: More like YOUR Own Petard! If you attempt to use a Pan-Dimensional Weapon on Cyrus, he will turn it against you and kill you on the spot.
• Hungry Jungle: One of these shows up on the ship, complete with man-eating plants and player-strangling vines.
• Hyperspace Arsenal: Played with. You can only carry up to FIVE items, but weapons aren't considered "items".
• It's a Wonderful Failure: You can trigger the ship's self destruct system. It's possible to get to an escape pod and blast to a safe distance, but the plague Cyrus intended for your planet will now be carried across the galaxy.
• Lightswitch Surprise: Inverted when you confront Cyrus, one of his tactics is to turn off the lights instead, and make a quick getaway in the cover of darkness.
• Made of Incendium: After defeating a helicopter droid, the downed droid crashes and immediately causes a massive fire which destroys the entire room you confront it. You only have an opportunity to grab two (out of four) items from the room before getting out.
• Mad Scientist: Cyrus fits this to a T, complete with Large Ham Evil Gloating, Einstein Hair, Mad Scientist Laboratory, and unscrupulous experiments.
• Man of Wealth and Taste: Cyrus may be a madman and mass murderer, but he's certainly a man of class; his personal quarters are filled with ornate rugs, portraits, bookshelves and various luxuries. Keep in mind that a few rooms away from here are his laboratories and cells where he performs his gruesome experiments.
• Master of All: You are skilled "in the martial arts of twenty-seven different human and alien species".
• Mecha-Mooks: Many of the security personnel on the Vandervecken are robots.
• Mistaken for Granite: One encounter is when the assassin finds what appears to be a multi-armed idol from some alien planet. Except it suddenly steps off its pedestal and attacks with its various weapons.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: A scorpion with dragonfly wings attacks you at one point. You can also run into a man with tentacles for arms, which are heavily suggested not to be his real ones.
• Moon Logic Puzzle: A bunch of bird-like robots will attempt to ask you seemingly random, nonsensical questions as you attempt to make your way past one of the security rooms. Failing to give the right answers results in them all attacking you at the same time, which is practically unwinnable.
• Monster Compendium: You can collect a Digital Encyclopedia handy for identifying monsters.
• More Teeth than the Osmond Family: The Toroid is described as a "living doughnut" whose interior hole is lined with "nothing but teeth".
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: The Deity is a creature with 6 arms, each arm wielding a different weapon it can use against you.
• Never Trust a Title: From the name of the book you'd think your mission is to kill Cyrus, when it's to capture him to make him face justice.
• Night-Vision Goggles: You can find some you use to spot Cyrus escaping through a secret passage after he turns the lights off.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Offering a tribe of primitive aliens some berries... only to accidentally kill their leader because the berries turns out to be poisonous, causing the enraged tribe to swarm on you and kill you on the spot.
  • You can offer them an Aerosol Can of Nerve Gas instead... only for the Tribe leader to spray himself in the face and kill himself, leading to the same results.
• One-Hit Kill:
  • The gravity bombs are instant death for anything caught in its vortex but it's not really made for use in battle, that's why you have grenades.
  • The couple of alien guards who use disintegrator guns. If they land a hit in a shootout, you're dead. No armor roll, nothing. Mercifully these enemies have pretty low Skill scores.
• Only Smart People May Pass: The Zark's reasoning while threatening you with a disintegration ray.
• Our Werebeasts Are Different: The Tharn Doppelganger is a Werebat, implied that he Was Once a Man until Cyrus performed some nasty experiments on him.
• Phlebotinum Pills: Being a sci-fi adventure, your provisions has been replaced with Pep Pills that restores 5 STAMINA points each.
• The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: While everyone getting in there is a different story, the reader's character is actually sent to capture Cyrus so he can be made to stand trial for his crimes. Not kill him, despite the "assassin" claim.
• Planet Spaceship: The Vandervecken is an immense starship containing near-endless corridors and rooms along with a vast section of alien countryside.
• Powered Armor: In your penultimate confrontation against Cyrus, he will put on one of these, called a "WALDO", to battle you.
• Professional Killer: That's you, the Space Assassin.
• Race Against the Clock: When making your way to the Escape Pods as the Vandervecken is about to blow up, complete with each page announcing "T-MINUS X MINUTES" in caps.
• Rat Men: Fossniks are rat-looking aliens.
• Red Herring: You can meet an old man in a jail cell who tells you to pretend not to know what the Vandervecken's pilot is talking about if it tries to engage you in conversation. This is actually the opposite of what you should do, because humoring the pilot with a discussion in existentialism will earn you a valuable ally; it'll tell you the door you should take to reach Cyrus safely, and keep him from getting away if he gives the assassin the slip.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: The Cephalo Squirrels, of which you release a dozen of them from a glass container.
• Schmuck Bait:
  • When you confront Cyrus face-to-face, he will attempt to offer you a drink (it is spiked with a deadly poison), convince you to play a card game with him (he's reaching for a hidden pistol) and threaten to throw an explosive at you (its a fake, he's distracting you so that he can make a run for it).
  • Also late in the book there's a door with a bunch of menacing spheres floating around it. This only acts like a trap if you treat it like a trap; if you just ignore the spheres, they actually get out of your way.
• Self-Destruct Mechanism: The typical norm of '80s sci-fi. You had to make a quick getaway to the escape pods or die in the Vandervecken's explosion.
• Shout-Out:
  • When you meet Cyrus, his appearance resembles Joh Fredersen.
  • Cyrus' Powered Armor which he uses in the final battle is called a "WALDO".
• Slippery Skid: In the final confrontation against Cyrus, you can attempt to scatter ball bearings on the floor, causing his powered armour to become temporarily unstable and reducing its SKILL.
• Surveillance Station Slacker: Two of Cyrus's guards are shown watching futuristic football when you sneak upon them. The scene is even depicted on the front cover of the book!
• Talking Animal:
  • The Giant Spider can talk! Possibly justified though, he claims that he's from a planet of sentient spiders and was abducted to be experimented upon.
  • And then there's a talking squirrel, which can aid you or screw up your mission, depending if you're nice to him or not.
• Tentacled Terror: You get attacked by an octopus-like Bivalve at one point, and also risk getting pounced on by two squid-looking mutants should you attempt to walk around a pool.
• Underwater Base: One of Cyrus' extended hideouts, accessible only by submarine.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: There's extensive space given to a VR game where you find yourself piloting a tank against an enemy, which gain the player no particular advantage and can be avoided completely by just not picking a certain door.
• Unrealistic Black Hole: The Gravity Bomb weapon acts by holding one inside which expands into a singularity a few feet wide once detonated. It destroys everything in its sphere of influence, then disappears a few seconds later.
• Unusable Enemy Equipment: The Zark and the Deity have a disintegration ray which can One-Hit Kill you, but if you defeat them, you'll discover that the disintegration ray is incompatible with your weapons knowledge (ergo you can't use it), to keep it from becoming a Game-Breaker.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment:
  • Turning your blaster on a bunch of poorly-armed, midget-sized aliens? You'll kill several of them, but then they'll get past your defenses and stab you with fatally-poisoned darts.
  • Kill a defenseless little alien? You'll feel so guilty over it that you'll suffer 1 SKILL penalty.
  • Blast the Giant Spider as soon as you open the pod revealing it? Actually, the poor creature was another victim of Cyrus, and it might have helped you if you hadn't been so trigger-happy.
• Weaksauce Weakness: The two water mutants that guards the pool can be driven away by ink.
• Weak Turret Gun: You get to cross a corridor filled with mobile Pillboxes. Each of them only have 2 STAMINA points, but unfortunately you'll need to fight EIGHT of them simultaneously... if you've got a gravity bomb you can do a Dungeon Bypass.
• A Winner Is You: After defeating Cyrus (and saving your world), the text describes your victory as "You drag the unconscious Cyrus from the Waldo. Your mission is a complete success. Congratulations". That's it.

---