Battle Of The Planets

Copyright : MikroGen | Reviewed by : Malc Jennings

Message from center Neptune...You must defend the system against Zoltar, Good luck. That is the very basic and somewhat lacking introduction to Battle Of The Planets by Mikro Gen and I for one hope that the back of the box was a little more detailed than this.

Graphics

Battle Of The Planets is a 3D shoot-em-up simulator which looks and plays like the Atari games classic "Star Wars" but without the massive movie marketing and big name attachment.

This type of 3D game never realy looked much better on any home computer until the Doom era and in that respect we must say that it does look amazing on the Amstrad CPC, those that remember the classic "Elite" will instantly recognise the graphics and 3D style used. There are plenty of surprisingly detailed objects to shoot at, a fast moving environment and various planets to land on in order to fix your ship or blow the enemy to bits.

Good stuff.

Sound

Battle Of The Planets also delivers the goods in the audio field, we are provided with some great music (if you leave the introduction running and don?t hit your fire button) which is closely followed by some active but not massively random sounds in the game itself. It could have done with a little extra here and there as I?m sure you will agree when you play the game but for such a title like this release as early as it was it?s all very good stuff indeed.

Gameplay

Now here is the slight downside in our review, while the game looks great and sounds good it is let down slightly by the gameplay area, which of course is the most important factor in a game in the first place.

It lacks the emersion that Elite gives the player and the action that Star Wars provided you with but does still give you a good looking and fairly entertaining piece of software at the same time. It?s certainly not as fast paced as Star Wars and without the role playing elements of Elite it just lacks a little more than it should.

One worth trying for yourselves without a doubt but don?t go expecting Elite 2 or Star Wars : The Arcade Part 2 or anything like that.