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Apart from Dropzone on the C64 and Atari 8-bit, there have been very few good Defender-type games. Personally I think this is a great shame - if the classic two-way horizontally scrolling gameplay is properly exploited, it gives far more blast-for-blast, thrills and spills than any other shoot-'em-up format can ever hope to produce. And in these days of high-powered machines with wonderful sound and graphics capabilities, there's potential to create a Defender-style shoot-'em-up to end all shoot-'em-ups.

Star Ray goes some way to reaching this ideal, and is a game that'll appease the most demanding of blasting fanatics.

The action is set over seven different levels, each of which is played four times before the next one is tackled. Although the levels look different, the gameplay on all is fundamentally the same. The player takes control of the StarRay ship and defends ground installations from marauding aliens by flying over the two-way horizontally scrolling wrap-around planet and destroying all hostile intruders.

At the bottom of the screen is a radar display showing all alien activity, so that the player can spot impending troublespots or identify approaching hazards and swiftly take the appropriate action.

Each screen consists of several attack waves of aliens, which appear one after the other. Should all enemy craft be destroyed, a points bonus is given in relation to the amount of installations remaining.

As the player progresses through the levels, many different types of alien craft are encountered. Landers appear on every screen and attack ground installations by hovering over the target and draining all its energy. If the Lander isn't shot before its deed is done, the installation is either destroyed, or is 'perverted' and becomes hostile. If all eight installations are destroyed, the game ends.

Other aliens include Bombers, Krellian Motherships (pods that split open and release tiny green ships), Blue Hunters (which appear if the player takes too long to complete a screen), Living Crystals, Siliucon Worms and Radar Interference Satellites (shoot one and the radar screen is blacked out for some seconds - at great inconvenience), amongst many others.

Highscore fiends will be pleased to know that top scores are automatically saved to disk, and there's also a 'last game option' which allows a current game to be saved and continued at another time.

StarRay is by far the best pure blaster yet produced on 16-bit. It's slick and beautifully presented. Vivid parallax-scrolling backdrops and crisp sprites give a staggering visual effect, the sampled sound effects are stunning and the gameplay is fast and furious and really gets the adrenalin flowing!