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Shoot em ups, eh? We have certainly had them. We have had horizontally scrolling, vertically scrolling, four way scrolling, into the screen, viewed from above, side on, from behind, first person, third person perspectives. We have had the lot! If anyone ever writes another shoot em up they will have to have an extra special trick up their sleeves. Super incredible playability, extra smooth parallax scrolling, unprecedentedly powerful power-ups, ore something else. Do not ask me what – if i knew I would have sold the idea to Sensible Software and I would be designing my own shoot-em-up now instead of telling you about this one.
A second superstar?
If the Bitmap Brothers had followed up their 1989 shoot em up superstar Xenon 2 - Megablast, they would have written something a lot like this. It is the logical next step in the Xenon saga. Xenon was a slow, but involving vertical scroller that allowed you to change between a land-borne craft, which looks a lot like your ship in Blastar, and a flying ship. The landscape was a futuristic metal planet. Xenon 2 went one step further. The land craft was discarded for a spaceship that could be rigged with so many power-ups it really deserved the Megablast part of the title. The scenery was now organic, flailing tentacles ensnaring your ship. If, in Xenon 2, you took a wrong turn, you could pull back on the joystick and scroll backwards down the route you had taken. A kind of two-way scrolling shoot em up.

If the Bitmaps had not gone on to produce Gods, Magic Pockets and The Chaos Engine, but had produced Xenon 3 instead, do you not think they might have had a viewed from above four-way scrolling shoot em up? Especially one where you fly over a fetid organic landscape?

Enter Core Design. Enter Blastar, with the same dark and moody look, the same organic landscape, the same ‘Entering Shop’ section for buying power-ups. There is nothing I love more than a good shoot em up. But there is nothing I hate more than an average one. And sadly, that is what Blastar is. The gameplay is average, the control method is unwieldy, the music is average, the sound effects are uninspiring, the aliens are unintelligent and difficult to see, the missions are dull, the intro animation is awful. But Blastar does have one original twist, as part of some of the missions you have to ‘enter the tunnels and destroy the guardians’. And the perspective shifts to a horizontally scrolling, Scramble-type shoot em up. This section is not average... it is awful. The worst parallax scrolling we have ever seen combine with pretty poor graphics to produce something which is crap!

Sadly, nowhere near it!
Does Blastar have anything going for it? The box illustration and logo are nice, and the instructions are printed on the back of a rather fine A2 poster of said artwork.
If you really need to play a viewed-from-above space shoot em up, turn to page 54 and see if Uridium 2 is any cop.
Marcus Dyson