If you read last weeks news article you will already no about Quazer Wars, it is a new multistrolling shoot-em-up from Light Designs. I have had a little more time to play around with the demo version of the game since then and have come up with this preview of the game to let you know what I think...

The game demo comes in what is condidered quite a small archive these days of 700k. Don't let this put you off though as as all it is really missing is the flashy intros that the other demos include. In the readme included in the archive it says to extract the game to a floppy disk, the game can, however, also be ran from HD by just setting a small assign.

Once loaded you will be presented with the title screen, from here you can either start a new game or enter a password, this is the way in which the game records your progression, after completing each mission you are given a password. Selecting to start a new game takes you to the mission breifing screen, this is where you are given all the details about your mission, you can also purchase weapons and upgrade your ship here (More on this later).

Once you have read what you need to do, it's time to go to the game proper. You are given a top down view of your ship and the landscape, you have to guide the ship across the landscape using the up on the joystick to speed up and the left and right to rotate in 360 degrees. The game allowing you to go in any direction you want adds a certain freedom to the game and is much better then being limited to 8 direction scrolling.

Basically most missions involve shooting the hell out of everything, there are some other missions which involve collecting things etc but the main part of the game is shooting things. To do this you have a standard gun which is accessed by pressing fire, this can be upgraded to make it more powerful. As well as this there are also some other weapons at your disposal, these are fired by pressing the fire button twice in quick succession, to change what this weapon is you hold fire down and hold down on the joystick. these weapons vary from various missiles to bombs and mines, there not free though and have to be purchased on the mission briefing screen.

One thing the game does lack in my opinion in some sort of configurability of the controls. They can be quite difficult to get used to and an option to suit them to your needs and also maybe allowing you to use a joypad might have been an idea. There is some keyboard support in the game which does make things slightly easier and you will probably find that it is best to use a mixture of joystick and keyboard.

This is a very smart game, and if some of the problems it has are ironed out it could maybe worth a commercial release. One of the major problems is that there is a lack of variety in the missions, but this is nothing that can't be sorted out. It has many good points though, for one the scrolling is excellent and hardly slows down at-all, it also works on any 1MB Amiga which will please you A500 users out there ;).

The full game will contain 16 missions spread over 3 worlds. At the moment it is only available direct from the authors as Shareware. It only costs £15 (£12 if you have an Email address) to order the game so if you like the look of the demo, go buy it! Its not very often a game of this quality is available for so cheap. To order it just send the money to:

Light Designs
Plaza Espanya, 9 1-1
08207 Sabadell (Barcalona)
Spain

For any questions you can email one of the authors at:- lightdesigns@redestb.es

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