Reviews

It's shmup that turns into a platform shooter. First you shoot anything in front of you and then you look for parts of the bomb, so essentially it's two games in one cassette. It's quite a nice game, I like the colourful graphics and the mixture in the gameplay personally stands out for me. I rather liked this one, good stuff.

by Colin Grunes, Stuart James Fotheringham, Steve Parys, Barry Leitch?

This is a typical case of as-a-budget-it-would-have-been-pretty-good. I.C.U.P.S., in fact, would have been a deluxe budget with its superb graphics, beautiful shadings and colours, perfectly drawn sprites, and very nice multi-channel music, but as a game, and moreover as a full price game, seems to be the scientific result of a Frankenstein operation: the union of two unfinished games in the attempt to create a whole one. The first is a sort of Spy Hunter set in space, you drive a spacecraft in a cosmic highway and you have to destroy or dodge other flying vehicles trying to crush you or shoot you. It's not bad. Once survived three sections of that, you gain access to the second, which is a very minor Nodes of Yesod style game [actually programmed by the same people of Odin Software], in which you, as a droid with vague insect-like appearance and motion, explore a starship walking and flying around flip-screens, in order to locate four bombs. There are 64 rooms only and they are all the same and slightly empty, although splendidy designed. It was quite easy finishing it, once discovered how to get the bombs. So, wonderful aesthetics thanks to Stuart James Fotheringham, but not much else - surely a disappointment for Odin fans, as Hypaball this same year but unlike Heartland.

3/5