Reviews

Starstrike is quite obviously an unauthorized Star Wars game. The concept is very Star Wars - you fly your ship to the Death Star, attack it, and attempt to destroy it, just as Luke did in the film.

You begin in space - on your journey to your target. While you're approaching, you are attacked by enemies which are very reminiscent of tie-fighters. After this wave is complete, you then fly low over the surface of your target, again trying to defend yourself from attack. You can get a bonus by shooting the tops off the towers. Once you've passed this, then you enter the final attack run - in the equatorial duct, dodging the catwalks, trying to shoot off the cannons and avoid incoming fire. Finally, you arrive at the reactor - you must shoot the two pods to succeed, or you have to repeat the run.

This is one of the fast moving 3D games for the Spectrum, using wire frame graphics. It has a faster pace than Elite, and very responsive controls - technically, it appears very competent. The low level flight over the Death Star is my favorite part, and probably the most challenging to get right, since your controls move the firing reticule and steer the ship, but one more than the other. It's easy to get carried away and collide with a tower (at which point you do a roll).

My only real criticism of the game is that it lacks depth. The three main phases don't last all that long, so you very quickly go through the main phases, destroy the reactor, hyperspace and attack the next Death Star. The shortness of the levels does mean it can get a bit repetitive, and I think a bit more variety in the "low flying" part could have improved the game. Having said that, in general the game does stand out from the crowd, and it does let you start at a higher difficulty level, so if you want the challenge you don't have to wade through lots of easy screens to get there. Technically, it's competent, and it's a good game to pick up if you need ten minutes relief from real life.

Really fun game which not only plays like Star Wars but better too.

Essentially a clone of Star Wars, it appeared 3 years before the official licenced game hit the Spectrum. It's also slightly more playable than Star Wars in my opinion.

by Ian Oliver, Andrew Onions, Graeme Baird, Oliver Frey
As WE ALL KNOW, brilliant unofficial conversion, by the vector graphics masters of Realtime Software, of the famous Star Wars coin-op by Atari, with big and relatively colourful vector graphics, and ok speed and smoothness - the latters not comparable to the absurd Dark Star, which, anwyay, has less happening all at once in the screen, and has a certain pointilistic style. On the playability side, Starstrike is still a bit hard, but there are various skill levels among which you can choose, but the gameplay is dense and pauseless, and it's fun enough. This makes a certain difference.
4/5

I think it has a lot of merit to Try anything 3D related on the humble ZX.
In this case, as the most ones, it's vector-based instead of polygon based.
Fun, action driven and technically brilliant