I was really looking forward to
this one, 'Oh wow, another
incredible Speccy horizontal
shoot-'em-up to rival
R-Type in
the arcade accuracy and
general all-round fabness
stakes, I thought'. Big (big)
mistake. When I finally got the
first level up and running (it's
another one of those horrible
beasts, a game which multiloads
even on 128K machines), I was
mortified to find myself playing a
hideously slow, graphically
abysmal, impossibly tedious
load of old junk that bore about
as much resemblance to the
gorgeous coin-op as I do to
Princess Anne (or, indeed, the
horse she rode in on).
The actual playing area is
tiny, but in order to make it
seem bigger the programmers
haven't put any kind of border
around it, so that you can easily
find yourself moving up the
screen to avoid a bullet, only to
discover too late that you can't
actually go any further. So you
die, get sent back miles through
the bits you've already ploughed
tortuously past, and do the
whole thing again until you die
of the boredom of
seeing every attack and
every alien appear from
the exact same
place every time. As
if that wasn't
enough, the far-from
dazzling pace drops to
a crawl whenever more
than about four sprites
are on the screen at
once, making the game
an utter chore. The only light
at the end of the tunnel comes
from some of the big, nicely
animated enemies like the robot
tigers and the gigantic bull at the
end of level one, but they're not
worth the damage you'll have to
wreak on your keyboard to get
to see them.
If you haven't got
R-Type yet,
go out and buy it at once and
forget about this dross. If you
have got
R-Type, go
and play it at once
and forget all
about this dross.
Ugh.
| Arcade version screenshot... |
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| Click here to view all 8 pics |
| Ratings given by other magazines |
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| Info supplied by the SPOT*ON database |
