“50’s-SciFi-pulp-book-covers” are back on the menu!
Look at this glorious nonsense. Artist Jim Talbot did a fine job.
The game behind it is a shooter from Avalon Hill.
Fairly standard stuff with a few quirks.
You have just graduated with honors from Cadet training. Your first mission is especially important. You must deliver a TOP SECRET diplomatic message to the Emperor of the Glaxiau Empire – immediately! You proceed to
cross the galaxy via the latest Black Hole acceleration techniques when your
trips is interrupted by a gigantic spaceship which intends on ensuring that
the message you carry never reaches the Emperor. You heard rumors in
school of IT being out there – the reason for so many missing ships. Your
only hope for survival and success in your mission is to destroy ITs power
generators before IT kills you with intelligent plasma fireballs or
disintegrates you with high energy defensive shields.
IT? Like the novel? Like “Killer Klowns from Outer Space“?
I knew that movie was accurate.
You can move freely between two energy barriers and yes, flying out to the left teleports you to the right and vice versa.
Appreciate it!
Your goal is to destroy two energy generators. They will fire guided plasma balls(?) so you better move around constantly.
You, on the other hand, have slow torpedos in your arsenal. You can guide them too by holding down the fire button.
This is necessary because as soon as the generators take damage they will produce shields.
Lots of ’em.
So you better ‘git gud’ with guiding your shots and avoiding fire at the same time.
After you’ve destroyed both generators the main generator appears in the middle.
At the same moment, the lower barrier will slowly move towards you giving you only limited time to seal the deal.
The game ends when you or IT are merely tears in the rain.
What I really like here are the three difficulty settings.
‘Easy’ is actually easy because you have a repair team on board that restores health if you don’t get hit for 15 seconds. ‘Hard’ is a real nail-biter with no repair team and fast firing enemies.
I know, this shouldn’t be anything special, but it sadly is so I’m giving it some extra points.
The presentation is mediocre. I mean what is space without stars, right? Why are devs always forgetting this?
Guided missiles finally have a real purpose and figuring out a good strategy is really tense.
“Can I hit the generator or should I get the heck out of the heat zone?”
What sucks tho is that it takes forever to destroy the generators.
I thought the game was broken the first time I played it. I know they tried to make it last longer but now the game takes ten minutes to beat (which is still short) and is also tedious.
Well thought out, guys.
There are also no gameplay variations or a multiplayer modes so once you’ve beaten the game on every difficulty setting you probably won’t touch it again.
Its a shame tho because making guided missiles the main focus of the game is a great idea and works well. They’ve just neglected almost everything around it.
Still interesting and at least worth a look.
Refreshing and tedious. What a weird combination.
Find out how by playing Death Trap!
Advertisements Share this:
