Reviews

Although more famous for their graphical adventures, Gargoyle Games made a fairly auspicious debut with the is fast paced pseudo-3D shoot 'em up.

The graphics are pretty good, and there's some great use of colour in a genre more typically blighted by monochrome, although this is at the usual price of your spaceship, and many other objects in the game, moving around in obvious character square blocks. The 3D effect isn't totally convincing, with it largely just being a 2D game with some scaled frames for the sprites; the fudged perspective generally just serves to make it really difficult to fire into the top corners of the screen. There's also an irritating graphical glitch that allows you to shoot holes in your spacecraft when moving directly up the screen.

What will most likely have you cursing at it though, is the difficulty of spotting the bullets being fired at you and the slightly suspect collision detection. Still, neither is a game killer and with a bit of practice they can both be lived with.

Although not quite the finished article, and rather inferior to the later Light Force, this at least showed that Gargoyle Games was going to be a force to be reckoned with.

1984 Gargoyle Games (UK)
by Roy Carter and Greg Follis

Again, you pilot a patrol spaceship throughout deep space, searching for pirates and enemy aliens. Nothing new, you may add, and your right, it's just another run of the mill shoot 'em up with the same plot as 100 other similar games. The game on the other hand, is slightly complex and interesting, for a shmup, that is.
The main bit being the nice 3D effects, which are obviously simple but different from the bunch.
The big sprites limit the action a bit but not by much, and the game functions quite well. If you are into shoot-em-ups, this is definetely worth checking out. Not my favorite but nonetheless a memorable game from 1984.

Right now the average of this one on WoS is 7.40 from 44 votes, while the not totally dissimilar and vastly superior New Cylon Attack has only a 7.09 or something. But, beside the big colourful graphics [the asteroids more importantly], the rest is not much impressive: there's something wrong in the perspective, which makes you inadvertently collide against enemy ships, asteroids and bullets - there's no sign of motion, you seem to be completly still, no sense of depth, a star field completely still itself, the sounds are little silly "bip's": a starship explodes and all you hear is "bip". The playability is not that good either because of the perspective problem aforementioned. I'm tempted to give it 2/5, but for now I'll settle on a very narrow 3/5.

The 'stunning graphics' (Crash 1984 review) were in a nick of time ahead of many games that looked better and functioned better. Ad Astra left me indiferent in 1984 and that holds today.

The most annoying aspect of the game is that you can run right round a bullet and back into its path again making your clunky looking craft feel implausibly quick!

The '3D' perspective is just plain odd.

Despite looking gorgeous the gameplay was too awkward for me. It's overcomplicated where if it was more straightforward it may have been more enjoyable. Shame really as the graphics are wonderful, but if its gameplay doesn't match it's hard to like no matter how pretty you look.