Alien Legion logo

GAINSTAR £24.95 * Joystick or Keyboard

Eek! Guess what? Aliens have invaded and only you can save the world from misery and damnation. In the guise of Captain Cosmose you must work your way through this horizontally scrolling platform cum shoot-em-up blasting away all the little alien baddies and avoiding their shots.

Moving around is mostly left right with short and long jumps to enable you to hop between platforms or across gaps. Every hit the aliens make reduces your energy bar, which can be topped up by grabbing potions.

Not a bad game, it looks and sounds all right and it'll take a while to work through four levels, but it's simple and adds nothing new to this genre of game.


Alien Legion logo

Gainstar
Price: £24.99

Gainstar are proving to be a shrewd publishing company. Not only do they have Discovery's games, they also float around Europe picking up those addictive little games that maybe don't have great sound and graphics, but keep you coming back for more. Games like Zoom a CU favourite, come to mind.

Alien Legion, programmed in Germany, is perhaps a little more mainstream - it's a horizontal shoot 'em up, but it's nicely designed and visually appealing enough to retain interest.

You control a space-suited hero trying to rid his world of aliens before leaping in your ship and flying off into the cosmos. The game scrolls horizontally, but you can take it at your own pace.

There are two kinds of danger in Alien Legion, the one comes from the aliens themselves, the other form the holes and water traps that you have to somersault your man over Impossible Mission style.

When you kill the aliens flasks are released which float upwards. They're either red or green and collecting the latter restores lost energy by taking hits.

The main appeal of Alien Legion is visual for me. NO metallic super graphics its true, but there's a sort of cartoon quality to the game with cuteish aliens and other bizarre obstacles like the tulip-like objects which fire at you and disappear back into the ground.

Sound is nothing special it's true, but my main gripe, with the version I was given anyway, was that you had to wait for the game to reload every time you lost all three lives. Neverthelss there's four longish levels here which should test most of you for a while.