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Review

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Huge playlist archive with Kempston Mouse games: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxOanVBhqd3tM1Ov2sGHI177WdlY0wali
INTRODUCTION:
It's Earth year 2992. Humankind is part of one of two factions battling for the control of the multiverse. After a long time of stalemate, the enemy faction, led by the prince Kalkux, developed faster and more powerful spaceships, achieving important victories. The human race started to lose faith in survival. Ships with artificial intelligence were not clever enough to handle new enemy ships. Remote controlling via quantum entanglement was not reliable in other universes. On the brink of despair, humans developed a new and faster ship, the "REDSHIFT" class, with a key innovation: a human pilot would be physically present in the ship. Your mission is to take control of Redshift to expel the enemy from key galaxies and universes.

- Designed for Spectrum 128K and compatibles.
- Music by Richard "Kulor" Armijo.
- 100% written in M/C, except BASIC routines in loaders.
- Fast paced scrolling action in a 192x192 pixels area.
- 5 levels (galaxies) x 3 loops (universes) with difficulty and enemies variations.
- 5 moving boss ships, 5 static boss structures, 10 types of sub-bosses and 25 types of regular enemy ships.
- Powerups, wingman and bombs available to the player, as well as bonus score for medals and performance.
- Introduction slides.
- Sounds configuration menu with separate volume management and pitch (lasers, explosions, etc.)
- Redefinable keys, common joysticks and Kempston mouse support.

REVIEW:
Shoot on everything that moves, or get shot yourself …It’s as simple as that! You get five levels of fast paced action in this shooter, and every time you make it to the end of a level you have to defeat a boss to proceed to the next level. To complete the game you will have to defeat it on all difficulties; meaning that you have to free all universes on Easy, Medium and Hard. You will be met by different types of defence forces depending on which difficulty you have chosen, and on Easy the boss fight is against a static boss, on Medium it is against a moving boss, and on Hard you have to defeat both of the bosses..!!

But before you get as far as that you have to blast your way through lots of lots of lots of enemy spaceships. Most of them is normal size spaceships like your own, but there is also bigger heavily armed ones that are not so easy to destroy. If you succeed in destroying some of the big enemies they will leave a power up. By shooting something that looks like a satellite you can get extra parts and extra firepower for your spaceship. You have a shield indicator on the right side of the screen, if you have three circles around the spaceship you have maximum protection. If you have no circles around the spaceship and get hit you will start losing the extra parts you have collected, and more hits will end up with losing everything and the ship getting destroyed. As time passes by the shield will recover if you don’t get hit.

When you have collected all power ups you will have four extra parts added to the ship, massive extra firepower, and a couple of drones following your ship and seeking for the enemies as soon as they enter the screen. You can collect shields, and when you do that, you will get maximum protection with three circles around the ship. You can also collect bombs and wingman support – Those are very useful for the boss fights. When selecting the bomb another spaceship will come flying and drop a big bomb, and selecting support will send a wingman helping you blasting the bosses to pieces!

This is quite a serious attempt of making a vertical shooter, it has very nice scrolling, fine animations of the enemies, and there is three difficulties to choose from when starting the game, so it should be possible to find one that fits your skills. What many shooters is missing, this one is not: An in game soundtrack! Oh yes, and a cool one too. And you can also choose K-mouse control - An extremely nice feature!

This game has a static background behind the vertical scrolling one, and some times there are horizontal scrolling stuff on the vertical scrolling background (see e.g. 31:11) and besides that it delivers everything that you can want if you are looking for a new shoot’em up: Extra parts for your ship, extra firepower, easy to see bullets, boss fights, in game music, intro, outro.

This is an updated version where the color clash have been fixed, and you in the menu have the opportunity for chosing to play with a black spaceship. This eliminates all color problems and the game now has stunning visuals.

The rating is for the black ship version played with K-mouse. The mouse control is superior and makes this game a true high speed arcade blaster. If you do not have a K-mouse interface for your Spectrum this game is worth buying it for.

Rating = 98%

It was made by Ariel Ruiz in 2019.

Download here: http://www.worldxxisoft.com/games.html