Space Battle

"Wow...I'm reviewing a game made on the year I was born...heh...I feel so old...oh well, this game rocks!"

Yes, even back in the days of the Intellivision and 2600 there were games that mixed two genres. Space Battle challenges your mind as well as your dexterity. Such complex gameplay in such a simple game is extremely impressive and whoever made this game must have been some kind of genius. This is my favorite Intellivision game; if you try it out, there's a chance it might be yours, too.

Story: 3
A space station in the middle of nowhere is suddenly under attack by fighters. You only have nine fighters in three divisions with which to defend your base.

Gameplay: 10
You start out with your base in the middle of the screen and the waves of fighters closing in. You must deploy the three divisions of fighters (white, blue and gold) and engage in battle with one swarm at a time. You are able to select which swarm you want a division to fly towards. If a swarm got past your divisions, you can command one to return to the base. A better thing to do would be to keep one division in the base just in case you need to deploy it quick if a swarm is about to get through your base shields. Your base has an outer and an inner shield. They slow down the swarms of fighters as they try flying closer to the base. You will hear an alarm if the shields are being penetrated.

You are able to tell how many enemy fighters are in a swarm by looking closely at the enemy swarm icon. There are three icons, one for a small swarm, one for a middle sized swarm and one for a large swarm. When one of your divisions collides with a swarm, you take control of one of the fighters. The screen changes to the cockpit of the fighter. You will see the enemy fighters flying around shooting at you. You can shoot at them, but if enemy lasers hit your crosshair, that fighter is toast. You will be able to tell how close the laser is to hitting your crosshair; it changes in size and color as it gets closer. If you take down a fighter that is flying very close to another fighter, the debris from the exploding fighter will hit the other one and take care of that one as well. You can set up huge chain reactions in this way.

If you defeat all of the swarms, a ''rising victory horn'' will play. You've won! Yes, this sounds easy, but if you put this game on a harder difficulty setting, it will be very far from easy. On the easiest mode, when a defense division encounters an enemy swarm, everything else stops while that fight takes place. If you put it on a harder setting, things are more like real life. If you engage one swarm with a defense division, the rest of the swarms will keep moving (but at a slower pace). Also, if you have more than one division deployed and they encounter an enemy, they will fight automatically. This sounds cool, but it really isn't, because to make it fair, the division fighting automatically will lose 1 ship for every three enemy ships it takes down. The fighter jets don't get harder to kill as you raise the difficulty level, but you will have to kill them quicker so you can stop the rest of the swarms from continuing through the shield and getting to your base. On the hardest level, everything moves so fast it's not even funny. The base's shields will seem like nothing. Heh, good luck.

Graphics: 8
The graphics on the map screen aren't that special, but the use of icons to depict how many fighter jets are in an enemy swarm/defense division is very innovative. The action screen has some pretty good graphics on it for a system of its time. The enemy jets are large and detailed. They also do barrel rolls at times; the animation on that is quite cool. Innovation is used again to show the player how much time they have to get out of the way of enemy lasers by making the shots get gradually bigger and change color as they get closer.

Sound: 5
The radar beep on the map screen will most likely get on your nerves, but most of the other sound effects are decent. The alarm sounds like an alarm, lasers sound like lasers and explosions sound like explosions. The rising victory horn doesn't really sound very cool, though.

Control: 9
Fine for the most part, but cycling through the enemy swarms to get to the one you want your division to fly towards can be tedious. They should have put little numbers next to the swarm icons, or something. Shooting and moving around when engaging the enemy isn't hard at all, and hit detection is very accurate.

Replay Value: 5
It's never the same game twice, since the enemy swarms close in from different directions every time, plus the size of each swarm is random. This, coupled with the difficulty settings means you can play this game for quite a while before wanting to play something else.

Bottom Line?
Games like these are what made the Intellivision a viable alternative to an Atari 2600. This game makes staying on your toes a very fun thing to do. I highly suggest you try it out. It's one of the best games that was made during the youth of the video game industry and is still enjoyable even today, which is why I give it a 10.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 10/24/01, Updated 04/22/04