Bedlam

"An unusual shooter-- beware the thin X!"

This game is a kind of reverse ‘Tempest’ where your craft rotates in place in the center of a web and creatures come pouring out of the vertices of the shape toward you in a kamikaze charge (they must have run out of ideas). You spin around in place firing your thin laser beams at them in an ultimately futile attempt to ward them off. Luckily, just like in ‘Tempest’ you are equipped with a super weapon which destroys all on screen enemies when the situation gets too dire. The four primitive enemies include: an eight pointed star that doesn’t deviate from its path (75 points), a small circular pod that takes occasional pit stops as it moves in slowly for the kill (100 points), a thick X that appears in large numbers in later levels (100 points), and the thin X (150 points)—these little bastards stop a distance away from your craft and wildly circle you looking for an opening so they can use the all too creative killing power of their brethren and plow right into you. If you don’t have a super weapon when this happens— that’s right, you’re toast. The more waves within a level you complete, the more triangular outgrowths surround you spouting enemies assembly line style.

As the levels progress the surrounding field presents a couple of new challenges, and it’s a good thing, because the basic game doesn’t remain immensely exciting. First, the vertices begin shrinking so that enemies spawn closer and closer to your craft until you shoot them and extend their distance once more. This means you aren't only fighting off an army, but keeping the shape maintained simultaneously by firing at it, kind of like juggling occupation and reconstruction in a certain foreign country, but I digress. Later, yet another monkey wrench is added as the levels rotate clockwise around you, likewise shrinking while the swarms approach. There are sound effects for firing and for the spawning and destruction of enemies, all pretty basic but they do the trick. The bit of music introducing this game is memorable, and you definitely learn the infuriating cracking sound of your ship fragmenting into numerous shards quite quickly. One nice graphical effect occurs whenever a wave is defeated and the shape sinks into the background, only to scale back into the foreground in its renewed form. This is an average shooter on the whole that doesn’t pull me back for a fix the same way as ‘Web Wars’ or ‘Fortress of Narzod.’

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 11/11/03