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Cor! There are quotes saying what a good shoot-'em-up this is all over the packaging. But I can honestly put my hand on my heart and say I detest it. It's too flamin' hard!

It's standard shoot-'em-up fare where you pilot your ship through hostile alien landscapes that scroll smoothly from right to left. Dozens of alien swarms and gun emplacements shoot at you and at the end of each level comes... an end-of-level guardian.

Shoot-'em-up gameplay is normally a bit tricky until you find some power-ups to get you through the really tough parts. IO is too difficult to start with. Then you find some power-ups which do very little indeed. And, just to shovel large pillars of salt into the already raw and gaping wound, the gameplay gets more difficult again.

Mind you, it's very slick. Rarely have I seen sprites rotate so well or alien formations swirl with such speed and finesse. But to come face to face with a frighteningly hard situation in the second or third screen of the first level just makes me want to switch off and cry myself to sleep. I loathe it and can only think of two people this would appeal to. The first is the programmer himself, and the second, if such a fellow exists, is Thrang, the omnipotent and all-playing god of badly designed shoot-'em-ups.

What is already a stunning looking shoot-'em-up has been rendered useless by overly difficult gameplay.