Bantam Books, $2.25, ISBN 0-553-24532-5
Sci-fi, 1985

Poor you. As an Interplanetary Agent, your work never ends. You are actually cruising in space, returning from your summer camp for superheroes gig when you get another mission. Apparently three dangerous criminals called the Planet Hunters are on the loose, and these fiends are on a rampage, destroying planets like a fat kid demolishing every dish on the buffet table. It makes sense to send a kid after three villains who destroy planets for fun, so what are you waiting for?

Planet Hunters is an interesting deviation of the norm with the introduction of options that are more typical of gamebooks for older readers. There are still puzzles here, but you are also given the options to choose which path you wish to take in order to take down the three villains one by one. Unfortunately, because the number of pages allocated to the book remains unchanged, this means that there actually more “Turn to page XY” entries than puzzles. As a result, the whole thing becomes tad linear and even boring as there are less options and puzzles to work on.

Still, this one deserves some credit for trying to do something a little different from the previous gamebooks in this series. It will probably bore older readers, but as an introduction to more sophisticated gamebooks, this one isn’t half bad at all.