Innocent Until Caught is a sci-fi point and click adventure with a massive number of locations and encounters across several planets. Not bad, but lacks the innovation and fluency in the controls needed to put it on the map. The game was released by Psygnosis for the Commodore Amiga, PC (DOS) and Apple Macintosh computers only.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY The Interstellat Reveue Decimination Service (IRDS) have got in it for Jack T. Ladd, a small time smuggler and contraband dealer. They want loads of money within the next 28 days or else they are going to do something very nasty to him. In order to earn enough cash to pay off this debt he must beg, borrow, swop, steal, basically anything legal or illegal that doesn't involve manual labor. It's a case, as usual, of collecting objects which help you progress through a a vast number of screens. You control Jack using a series of icons on the base of the screen, holding also the inventory panel. An interesting option is the speed setting, which allow you to set how long speech stays on screen. There is also a map in the bottom left-corner which guides you around the three planets and Cloud City. The satisfaction of completing a task that suddenly reveals a whole new area is immense, but you have to ask yourself if you can bear the monotony of driving your little character back and forth until he makes a connection that bears fruit. Although its nice visuals, sound and plot, the game suffers from sluggish precision of the mouse controls, that discourages you from exploring. It is too difficult to reach items a lot of times, as you need to point exactly to a specific pixel (!) on the screen to interact with it! If you manage to master this control system, then the game is fine. On the PC version its probably easier to do it, but on the Amiga it is a pain to live with it. You may also control your character with the cursors if you like and be able to scroll through each option (rather than click on the icon panel), but again the same sluggish precision to reach an object appears. Thus, the game's real flow is that it is difficult to control, but it gets more interesting with persistence. Disk swapping is also a pain in the ass too. The Amiga version holds 8 floppy-disks, so you can imagine how much disk swapping is getting frustrating (unless if you play the game via WHDLOAD nowadays). For a fan of the genre (like me), Innocent Until Caught is an attractive sci-fi story with plenty of exploring to be done, but even some seriously gorgeous graphics cannot raise the game above being second-rate for some users.
GRAPHICS / SOUND Thankfully, Innocent Until Caught is well drawn and this is its strongest point. It's not in the same class as Beneath A Steel Sky game, but it's suitably futuristic and slick with nicely drawn locations in 32 colors for the Amiga version. Characters are very well designed and animated too. The sound is also nice, offering some nicely composed tunes (especially the introductory theme) that add to the game's atmosphere, but lacks those neat little touches which make all the difference.
CPU: Motorola MC68000 7.16 MHz MEMORY: 512KB of Chip RAM (OCS chipset - A500), 512 KB of Slow RAM or Trapdoor RAM can be added via the trapdoor expansion, up to 8 MB of Fast RAM or a Hard drive can be added via the side expansion slot. The ECS chipset (A500+) offered 1MB on board to 2MB (extended) of Chip RAM. GRAPHICS: The OCS chipset (Amiga 500) features planar graphics (codename Denise custom chip), with up to 5 bit-planes (4 in hires), allowing 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32 color screens, from a 12bit RGB palette of 4096 colors. Resolutions varied from 320x256 (PAL, non-interlaced, up to 4096 colors) to 640x512 (interlace, up to 4 colors). Two special graphics modes where also included: Extra Half Bright with 64 colors and HAM with all 4096 colors on-screen. The ECS chipset models (Amiga 500+) offered same features but also extra high resolution screens up to 1280x512 pixels (4 colors at once). SOUND: (Paula) 4 hardware-mixed channels of 8-bit sound at up to 28 kHz. The hardware channels had independent volumes (65 levels) and sampling rates, and mixed down to two fully left and fully right stereo outputs