Reviews

it got bad reviews back in the days, but it doesn't seem so terribly bad to me.
it's a shoot'em up set in an organic environment. that's, you are inside some organism. at least i think. and i don't know exactly what you have to do. probably destroy the cholesterol that you piled up through the years, thanks to all those french fries and mayonnaise.
anyway, the animation is good, and the graphics are not bad. your vehicle floats slowly and atmospherically through the veins or whatever they are, and it's not that exciting a shoot'em up, to be frank, but it's sufficient, and, anyway, you can speed up your ship a bit picking up the right floating object.
any question?

Ever seen something you really liked the look of and then be left with a bad taste in your mouth when you try it? D.N.A. Warrior does that for me.

As a shmup fan I always look forward to coming across one on the World of Spectrum archive and then reading the poor reviews it got from the likes of Crash and Your Sinclair because of "boring, unoriginal gameplay". How many isometric games were there? How many soccer games were there? How many text adventures were there? So when "another shmup" comes up it INSTANTLY gets a 2/5 rating for being "the same" and usually I play them and I end up disagreeing with the "reviews".....however D.N.A. Warrior is a different kettle in the fish.

Early doors it's presented nicely, pretty nice intro sequence showing off the bonus pickups and all accompanied with excellent music from Nigel Pritchard, it makes you look forward to playing this game and it tickled my tastebuds and left me licking my lips in sheer anticipation...so I pressed start...sigh it was downhill from there.

Everything moves so slowly and it's difficult to shoot anything that comes towards you, when I went to move back it turn my ship around, not really a gripe as it's part of the game, but when there's a swarm of enemies coming towards me it's not ideal! It's really hard to get to grips with this game, the controls are so dodgy and the gameplay is slow and uninspiring, there's just a lot more better shmups on the ZX Spectrum than this.

So is it "the same"? No, because if it was it would be enjoyable, mildly pleasant and tolerable, this is far from it, frankly it's a nuisance. It's a great shame, it could have been so much better than it is. I really really really really REALLY want to like this...but I haven't got a reason too, and so that's it for D.N.A. Warrior, locked away into the cupboard on the highest possible shelf never to be touched again. Sob.

1989 Cascade Games Ltd (UK)
by Stewart Green, S.W. Scott, Nigel Pritchard and Alan Jones

This is by far the worst horizontal shoot 'em-up I've played. It looks pretty, but plays amazingly awful. It's painfully slow and hitting any enemies is a frustrating business. Why would you even think of releasing this is beyond me... well, the answer may be it would sell reasonably well, one glance at the pictures in the inlay and you would feel inclined in trying it. Don't!

Am I the only one to find this program a bit gore ???

Nice music and nice graphics but it's too slow and confusing to take seriously and enjoy. After about three minutes I felt I was done with it because nothing was happening, then you suddenly find a way to turn the other way and flying rocks much quicker than me flew towards me and killed me instantly. That's the end of that game then.