Reviews

This is a conversion of the arcade game from the Vektor Grafix team, who also handled the earlier Star Wars and later would go on to work on Fighter Bomber.

There are four stages to the game. You start with hunting down the Empire's probots before they can report back the position of the rebel base. The next stage has you hunting down the massive AT-AT walkers; you can either destroy them with a, tricky, head-shot or go for the tactic seen in the film and wrap around their legs with a tow cable. For the third stage you blast off into space in the Millennium Falcon to duel with some tie fighters. The final stage has you running through an asteroid field to escape the Imperial forces.

The graphics are a fairly faithful re-creation of the arcade look with coloured vector graphics. There's a bit of clash and things don't move quite as smoothly as the original, but it's still a very respectable performer for a Spectrum game.

On the whole, it's a very high quality re-creation of the arcade game, but I think it suffers somewhat in comparison to other vector graphic shooters on the Spectrum that were around at the time. The movement is all pretty much on rails, and consequently all you get to do is point your weapons and shoot.

As such, it's a decent game for a quick blast, but not even on a patch with the likes of Starglider, Tau Ceti and Starfox which have a lot more depth to their gameplay.

Sequel to Star Wars which contains the same title music, the same graphics, near enough the same gameplay but with in-game music and SOUND!...which was obviously missing from Star Wars.

Back in the day I probably would have advised you that if you had Star Wars there was no point in getting this because it's near enough the same game twice over and so wait till it's re-released on budget or something like that, but now just get the both of them since it costs nothing for the download. WIN!

The Spectrum conversion of the coin-op game licensed from the film, not a promising pretext for a game, but this is actually rather good.
Empire Strikes Back is one of the better examples of a wireframe / vector shooter on the Speccy. Controls are good, with aiming, banking and turning all working together. There is a bit of variation to the game, with different levels biased for shooting or flying, but this is a pure action game with little depth or strategy. The sound and music is pleasing enough on the 128k, and overall presentation is very nice.
This game is very close to being a 5/5 classic. It falls just short due to a bit of slowdown when there is too much on screen, and being too easy to play through to pose any lasting challenge.

Essentially the same game as Star Wars but with 128K sound being the massive improvement. Being too much like Star Wars drops a point though it's still an improvement and still worth playing.

I dont usually go for games with vector graphics, but this one, well, it's great.
The Stars Wars Saga did deserve a good game tie-in, and this is one you can't complain about.

The coloured vector graphics are faithful (with limitations) to the arcade coin-op, which is not always easy to do on a Spectrum, and putting aside a few clashing and lack of fluidity, the game is more than competent. So, thumbs up!

1988 Domark (UK)
by George Iwanow, Derrick Austin, Andy Craven, Ciaran Gultnieks and David Whittaker