Fun shooter, decent port of an arcade game
This was an early Genesis title, so one can't fault it for being fairly simple, but for what it is, it is an enjoyable distraction.
There aren't a variety of options and no multiplayer, but that's fine, because this is a great port of a decent arcade shooter. There are difficulty levels, and on the easy difficulty level you have infinite continues. You get less on normal and the least on hard.
If you compare this to the arcade game, you'll note subtle uses of color, shading, and a little more depth in the graphics, but those who did the port did a great job of preserving most of the image information. In fact, unless you're putting them side by side or have been playing the arcade version a lot lately, you may not be able to tell the difference!
The game itself is your standard vertical scrolling space shooter, with three types of armaments you can have for your ship (which explodes in one hit):
Normal shots (a spread of red bullets)
Thunder Laser (big green bolts)
Truxton Beam (a blue lightning bolt that spans the screen and can home in on bigger ships to do continuous damage)
You also have large skull themed bombs that can be dropped to blow up a cluster of enemies who fly into it, deal massive damage to bosses, or, more commonly, to save yourself from enemy bullets when you're about to be hit.
Finally, the real strategy in the game is picking up the "P"'s. These P's, when accumulated, upgrade your weapon, so you fire more shots, beams, bolts, etc. It's a real annoyance then, when you get wasted and lose all or most of your progress.
The sound is adequate for this type of game, and you may find it stuck in your head over time, but nothing too memorable.
The controls are easy enough, with one button firing your limited bombs, one firing your shots, and the other a "rapid fire" button, which is handy if you don't have a rapid fire controller (and your fingers WILL get tired after awhile, especially if you don't use the Truxton Beam exclusively). Start button pauses, and you can move your ship in eight directions.Read full review
