Reviews

It's a shmup from Alternative with one of the most confusing and unbalanced gameplays to ever exist. To complete a level you must bomb at least 10 of the glowing platforms, anything else from shooting the enemies to collecting the powerups to aid you and to help survive is COMPLETELY irrelevant! If you do not bomb at least 10 glowing platforms it's back to the beginning you go and everything was a waste of time, like playing this game for a start....sheesh what a waste. Less like a shmup and more like a mind boggling puzzler with about 20 things to do at once...even when you just have to bomb.

If you're looking for confusing monochrome graphics, random and unreliable collision detection, and bad keys layout - this shoot'em up is just for you.

1,75/5

And the third and final game from The Firm is Combat Zone, or M.E.N.T.O.R. which is on the title screen, so a bit of an identity crisis with this one it appears. This is shoot 'em up, that actually isn't a shoot 'em up. It's similar to Death or Glory which I reviewed a while back is that bombing seem to be the main concept of the game rather than shooting, because here you have to bomb at least 10 targets in order to complete the level, if you start you start all over from the very beginning again. The difference is CRL were charging £8.95 for Death or Glory while this was on the market for £1.99, however Death or Glory looked and played far nicer than this. This is frankly a mess, the graphics flicker when it scrolls, although that could easily be an emulation problem but still it hurt my eyes, its keys are horrible and it's difficult to determine what you're actually supposed to be bombing. So Combat Zone/M.E.N.T.O.R is actually similar to Bigfoot, a rubbish game with terrible gameplay, horrible graphics and above all else a ridiculous plot.