Reviews

Codemasters rip off yet another classic game, now they clone Gradius. I didn't really enjoy this game much, it's a little painfully slow but I suppose it wasn't so bad for the £1.99 price tag. Nothing else more to say about it really, it's Gradius and it's cheap.

A budget shoot-em-up from Code Masters.

There's clearly some coding ability here but it hasn't been honed and the result just isn't fun. It chugs along slowly and there's noticeable flickering. It looks like someone tried game creation package White Lightning, slogged through the basic sprite and scrolling tutorials, and stuck what they'd got on a tape. Things are just so obviously done on the cheap.

The first level borrows ideas from the Gradius series - the scenery is mostly flat, and streams of (weakly designed) baddies emit from blocky (but fairly well-designed) generators. But there things fall down as if you shoot the generators, the baddies still pop into existence in mid-air regardless. Other enemies vary in quality of design, but just don't seem to fit-in either scale-wise or stylistically.

The second level has no baddies, just a line-drawn slowly advancing narrow spiky cave to navigate through; yet the challenge is ruined by cheap area-based collision detection that means if you just miss a peak, you still die.

Beyond that, I seem to recall (through the use of POKEs) that the Gradius influence returns again; a different level layout but no better than before. But I really won't be playing it again to be sure.

Your ship sprite is novel and interesting, but the flicker and the bizarre nodding animation detracts from that entirely. There are tedious power-ups, such as the ability to have six rather than three slow shots on screen at the same time; they don't so much boost your abilities as make you wonder why such basic things were denied you from the start.

This is certainly not a game to get worked up about its 'distribution denied' status.

Decent horizontal space shoot'em up with power up's, especially for a budget release.
3/5

I quite like this but there is a problem with the shooting, sometimes it doesn't fire when you want it to and it leaves you a sitting duck for destruction. However, I was expecting much much worse and thankfully it's not. I would have happily paid £1.99 or whatever it was back in the day,