Reviews

1987 Mastertronic (UK)
by Roger Womack and Ed Knight

It's really hard to like this title.
Every bit of it seems to be made to irritate you and make you pull the plug the fastest you can. Maybe that was the goal of the programmers: to make the most obnoxious game ever. They were very, very close...
The game moves very slowly, specially your character, and the controls also take time to respond. So 'RAPID Fire' is not the best chosen name.
When an enemy gets a hold of you it starts to suck your blood. Are they vampires, zombies? What are they? I cant tell, they sure don't look like any of that.
Also you can't move or fire while they are at you, and you have to wait until they finish and a life is lost.
They also tend to shake if you stop at any time.
Why is that?
There's lots of unanswered questions about this title but I'm not gonna stick around for the answers.

The main character runs or, better, limps through the scrolling environment as he's desperately looking for a bathroom or ready to puke anywhere, while controls are rather unresponsive, making "Moderately Rapid Fire" a more suitable title for the game. Baddie come out from both direction, and it's almost pleasant shooting them down, but it drags on for too long before something changes. Then faster and thicker small exploding spheres fly towards you at different heights, and here's where you really need the famous Rapid Fire, but, as said, controls aren't smooth enough to make it a satisfying enough experience. Another couple of things: the more you shoot, the more your gun, as pictured in the panel at the bottom of the screen, becomes red, and if you exaggerate you'll probably have to let it cool down. And when an enemy reaches you, it creepily looks like he's draining all your blood by posing a hand on your neck, as, in the panel, the red inside a container leaks out - moreover, I wasn't able to free myself from that hold and I died.
We're definitely in Crap Territory.
1,5/5

Given the average score on WoS is so low and combined with the two 1 reviews here I anticipated this to be bad but good lord I didn't expect this to be such the turd it turned out to be. Your man is so very, very slow, like if you told him to jog to the shop across the street to get some milk and a newspaper it would take him a week he's that slow. And the enemies are just as bad as they jerk and stutter across the screen. The fire key is unresponsive as well and when you get to shoot the balls later on you do not have enough time to react to them all because you are both slow and unresponsive. This is one badly programmed game and it's no wonder the scores are so low for it. And Chris Jenkins of Sinclair User gave this game 6 out of 10?! Words fail me.