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So this was what we were returning to; a scarred battlefield and ashes. We'd travelled across the universe to save the Earth, we'd seen off the invaders and suffered the casualties, only to find It had all been a decoy.

So I'm In Shock sets the scene for this grid/shoot em up game. You can move your laser base left and right, while shooting up. The screen is divided into one character squares by green grid lines with you (and the aliens above) sitting in the squares. The number of aliens depends on how many waves you have killed off. They move about randomly, very slowy descending. Should one reach the bottom the game is over. Some squares have diagonal lines filling them, which cause your shots to rebound at right angles, whereas the aliens can fire through them quite happily. This requires some strategical thinking to use the shields to double rebound and thus still hit an alien. Every 3 screens, a command ship, resembling a spider, crawls across the screen half way up, and scores a bonus if you hit it.

Control keys: very simple, CAPS - V left, B - SPACE, right, H - ENTER, fire
Joystick: none
Keyboard play: fast and over-responsive
Graphics: average, small, I-character size
Sound: good
Skill levels: 5
Lives: 3

'The graphics are quite small and simple and the keys are over-responsive, making it very hard to move to an adjacent square. The game Itself is quite reasonable, but something of an anti-climax after reading the intro on the inlay - "The moon was the colour of wide frozen shrieks of laughter, the frost ran down the window - I'm in shock." See what I mean.'

'I thought the graphics and colour were generally rather poor, and the game, though an original idea, does tend to get repetetive and is very easy to play.'

'I like the energy reflectors, they added a dimension of strategy to an otherwise very ordinary shoot em up. But the alien craft could have been a bit more energetically nasty, it would have made the game more interesting to play. Very difficult to control small movements of the laser base too.