standard vertical space shoot'em up, with swarms of alien starships to destroy, wave after wave. it's playable, but not entertaining, and very far from being exciting, so there's nothing to keep you interested in it, as far as i can see, although the graphics are quite good, with very coloured spaceships, à la light force - but without those absolutely square shapes. but they're still angular.
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New review, December 1st 2016:
Xen [Sparklers]
Vertical shoot'em up with a clear debt towards Lightforce, which means that, at least, it's a colourful one, contrarily to the trend of the year.
It doesn't seem to have much more to it, though.
2,75/5
A decent budget clone of Light Force, with large and colorful graphics, where you simply have to shoot wave after wave of aliens coming from the top of the screen over a top-down scrolling landscape.
Good if you fancy some casual alien blasting, but there's nothing more here.
Review by Raphie on 09 Feb 2012 (Rating: 2)
Xen (Sen? Zen? I don't know, frankly I don't care) is a pretty mediocre shmup, nice enough graphics but it's no fun being a shooter where you have to steer away from the enemies to survive most of the time, I mean the absolute majority of the time, it may as well be another one of those driving games rather than a shoot-em-up! It is generally a battle of survival and aviodance rather than shooting anything on the screen. Safe to say I've played better shmups on the Spectrum than this.
