Overkill (noun): something, e.g. power for destruction, in excess of what is

Ooh, I'm so frustrated. I've been going out of my head for the last three days trying to remember the name of the coin-op that this game reminds me of, and I just can't get it. It was out about a year or so ago (possibly more like two), it was by Midway (I think), and it was a ridiculously frenetic updating of Defender, in much the same way that Smash TV gave the '90s reworking treatment to Robotron. Overkill has clearly been heavily inspired by it, but I can't remember enough about the coin-op to say for sure whether Overkill's a straight clone of it or just a bit similar, and it's driving me mental. It's like when you have a really weird dream, and then you wake up and get distracted for the briefest moment, and then you can't for the life of you recall what you'd been dreaming about just twenty seconds earlier, y'know?

No, you probably don't, do you? It's probably just me. But whether you identify with that particular situation or not, there's no escaping one thing, and that's that Overkill is a new game from Vision Software, the people who brought you the storming Defender (on our issue 26 coverdisk). Unlike those two, though, Overkill isn't written with Blitz Basic 2, but is in fact 100% AGA machine code, and for the A1200 only to boot. And since we've already established that I can't provide you with a precise reference point in the form of a coin-op comparison, I'd better tell you what it's about.

Well, it's Defender, basically. Yeah, sure, there are a few tweaks and extras, but the gameplay is all but identical. Some nasty aliens are trying to steal crystals which litter the ground of various planets, in order to transform themselves into harder aliens. You have to blast the aliens, obviously, but you also have to help a little army of humanoids who walk around on the ground trying to blow up the crystals before the aliens can get their slimy tentacles on them. When one manages to get a crystal, you have to pick him up off the ground to re-arm him with another anti-crystal mine, then drop him back off on the planet for another go. In a further dramatic plot twist, though - oh. There don't appear to be any more dramatic plot twists. That's it. Blow baddies away, pick up and drop off little humanoid geezers, and nothing else. Fair enough.

Overkill might be simple, but it's far from easy. After the first couple of levels (there are seventeen planets to clear, and it's fearsomely hard by about number seven) the near-harmless (ish) airborne aliens you start off against are joined by enormous pseudo-boss characters, fast-moving and difficult-to-hit wormlike things, and utterly horrible ground tanks which fire totally evil missiles at you. To be honest, it makes very little difference whether you let the aliens grab the crystals or not - unlike Defender, there's no cataclysmic planet-exploding disaster unleashed on you if you allow all of them to be nicked, and the mutant aliens created by one escaping with a crystal aren't really significantly meaner than the ordinary ones - but the major points rewards you get for destroying them and collecting the humanoids are your only real chance of getting anywhere, since you get an extra life and shield-like extension every 25,000 points, so you're constantly being tempted to fly into horrifically dangerous places in order to grab your little troopers.

Overkill is loaded with power-ups, but they've all got a limited life and things never get unbalanced (well, not in your favour, at least), so the game's a constantly challenging battle against what rapidly become completely overwhelming odds. You do, though, in the tradition of all great games, find yourself getting further into it, the more you play it, so it's never either frustratingly hard or tediously easy (or even a little bit easy). The difficulty curve, in fact, is probably Overkill's greatest strength, which with only seventeen planets to conquer is probably just as well.

Aesthetically, you might not be especially impressed with the screenshots on these pages, but that's only because you can't see them moving. The parallax scrolling is lovely, movement is super-smooth, aliens explode in an extremely gratifying over-ripe watermelon kind of a way, and even when there's a completely silly number of sprites all hurtling around, there's never the slightest hint of slowdown or breakup. Then again, it is running on an A1200, so what else would you expect?

Sound isn't great (perfectly decent blasting and exploding sounds but not enough of them, and pretty ropey speech synthesis) but it's good enough, and the important things like control response and graphical clarity are just peachy.

The only thing which really disturbs me about Overkill is the price. It's all very well saying a great game is a great game whatever it costs (which is true, after all) but this really isn't very far advanced from something like Anarchy (which you can get on Psygnosis' budget label Sizzlers for less than a tenner!) or even from Defender itself, which, of course, is free. Whether you think extra 16 (or 26) quid is too much to pay for some flashy graphics and nice parallax scrolling or not is entirely up to you, though, and I can't see anyone who buys this feeling too ripped off at the end of the day. Just don't expect anything more than a great old-fashioned arcade blast, and you certainly won't be disappointed.

Uppers: Great difficulty curve, frantic action, incredibly busy but always clear graphics, and generally top shoot-'em-up thrills aplenty.

Downers: The sound seems like a bit of an afterthought, (although what there is is perfectly fine) and gameplay depth is conspicuous by its absence.

Although it may well be a bit thin for a full-price release in this day and age, Overkill is still a damn groovy blast in classic Defender style, and you'll never find me complaining about one of those.