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When the freeware shoot 'em up Warning Forever was released in 2001, it was hailed in some circles as something of a master-work. Featuring wonderfully clean vector-inspired visuals, Warning Forever deviated from the traditional shooter approach by excising the preliminary footwork through low-ranking 'popcorn' enemies prior to the end-of-level 'boss', simply assaulting you with a constant flow of screen-filling guardians. Not in itself a revolutionary concept, the clever bit was the way that subsequent iterations of WF's bosses would adapt and evolve themselves to counter your attack strategies as you played deeper into the game. This fascinating concept was beautifully realised, with bosses that would come back larger, stronger, and sporting more of any particular weapon type to which you had previously proved susceptible.

Fraxy seems to be very much inspired by Warning Forever, being an endless 'boss rush' shooter. Now while some might question the approach of just fighting bosses, or think it's like skipping to the climax of Independence Day without seeing all those endless shots of Will Smith messing about in an F-18, Fraxy is still more than worthy of your attention. Visually it's totally unlike WF, favouring bitmap rather than vector stylings, and it handsomely replicates the hand-drawn multi-part bosses of Konami's Gradius games. The way the bosses themselves are rendered is particularly impressive, they each can possess a multitude of independent working elements, such as rotating snake-like arms, individually controlled boosters, laser turrets and flamer weapons, and can put up quite a challenge as you attempt to take out their 'core' weak-points and bring them down.

The default Asteroids-like control method, which uses the mouse to rotate your ship and aim your fire, and the cursor keys to move, is slightly awkward at first but perseverance pays off if you stick with it. You are only given two weapons, which can be switched with the left shift key to alternate between a rapid firing laser and a powerful but much slower firing cannon. There's also a handy re-generating shield which will allow you to take a number of hits before being destroyed. Admittedly the game is still in a rather 'demo-like' state and the greatest enjoyment will probably come from just selecting the 'Free Play' then 'Random' options from the menu, which will give you a good flavour of the game as you face off against a number of pre-designed guardians built into the package by the game's developers. As in Warning Forever the fun comes from taking each boss apart piece by piece until you strip down their defensive exo-skeletons enough to destroy their internal core.

Fraxy's most notable feature though is its 'boss editor'. As someone that spent an awful lot of time back in the day mucking about with SEUCK, this was something very intriguing to me when I first heard about it, and I can report that the application here has enormous potential for those wishing to produce some truly impressive boss creations as well as plenty of scope for users merely wanting to play around with it as a 'sandbox' feature. Although the editor takes a bit of time to get used to (you'll need familiarise yourself with each of the forty odd individual 'parts' and their functions including all the different weapon types, engines and linking structures which you'll use to make up your final boss) you could literally spend hours experimenting with it. I managed to put together some reasonable efforts in around 20 minutes for the purpose of this review, and was rather pleased with the results when I fired them up in-game to blow my personal handiwork to oblivion.

The only downside is that the game needs a pretty beefy PC to run well in anything but the tiny default 320x240 windowed resolution (my admittedly aging 1.2mhz setup even struggles with that at times with larger bosses featuring significant amounts of rotation). However if the developers continue to revise their title's content and as the user-base of independent 'boss creators' expands, Fraxy will certainly be a title to keep an eye on.

(Want some more bosses to fight? See fraxy.pbwiki.com/The%20Bosses/ and indygamer.blogspot.com/2007/05/fraxy-user-creations.html for some truly magnificent specimens.)