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To my knowledge this was the only title of the very short-lived Mastertronic MAD-X range. The idea was to offer you two games on a same tape for £ 2.99.

It is a competently made, but ultimately rather shallow shoot-em-up, where you command a hunting flying vessel battling different patterns of aliens on a nicely rendered background, complete with three different layers of parallax scrolling. Anyone who knows how the Spectrum display is managed will wonder at this piece of technical marvel.

Other than that, there's not much. The game on the B side, Molecule Man, is more complex and involving.

It is the year 2079, and the decaying, polluted earth values more than ever its precious few acres of unspoiled nature. As a warden, you are responsible for maintaining the health of one such area.

At first all you had to do was some tidying up and the herding of animals, but now things have changed. A distant star has become a supernova, and Wavaren, creatures that inhaboted one of its encircling planets, have found a new home - in your reserve. So your job description has been rewritten to include their destruction.

The reserve consists of forest, ocean islands and rocky desert; these three regions are further divided by force fields into ten areas, with aura energy maintaining their original condition in each. But the presence of Wavaren reduces this energy, and if it ever reaches zero level the area dies. And if three of a region's areas are wasted this way, you've lost.

The Wavaren fly around in an aerial cornucopia of jellyfish, fairy cakes, molecules and rotund craft, showing off and manoeuvring around your small fighter as it skims above the horizontally-scrolling landscape.

Your fighter is equipped with forward-firing lasers - it may take a few blasts before some robot craft succumb - and several blitz bombs annihilate all the Wavaren onscreen.

When some Wavaren vehicles are destroyed, a series of icons temporarily appears and other sections can be reached, your life substance increased, extra bombs acquired or your fighter's power improved.

They never told you environmentalism would be like this when you joined the Green Party.



CRITICISM
'Though graphically quite good, with neat backgrounds, Energy Warrior has little content Horizontally-scrolling shoot-'em-ups are all very well, but unless there's some remarkable feature they can be quite dull and unplayable.'
MIKE ... 40%

'Energy Warrior is a pretty ordinary horizontally-scrolling shoot-'em-up, quite playable but offering nothing original. There are plenty of landscapes but they're all slightly too easy to complete: it's just a matter of finding a safe place and learning the attack formations, which soon becomes tedious. Graphically it's reasonable, with smooth by slow scrolling and fairly well-drawn and detailed sprites (they're a bit bland, though). The backgrounds are colourful and varied, though slightly garish and each level has its own character and atmosphere. Molecule Man, the B-side game, is much better.'
GORDON ... 50%

COMMENTS
Joysticks: Kempston, Sinclair
Graphics: slow scrolling, good varied backgrounds
Sound: pip pip!
Options: 'free' B-side maze, Molecule Man (85% Overall in Issue 30)
General Rating: Far too easy, but maybe worth getting for the 'free' game!

Presentation 43%
Graphics 53%
Playability 45%
Addictiveness 40%
Overall 45%