Reviews

A bad and partial version of a wonderful coin-op which was also known by its Japanese title, Xain'd Sleena, Soldier Of Light reeks of "rush job" from start to finish.

Not only the bland and colorless graphics bear almost no resemblance to the original game, and sound is almost absent, but the frantic pace of the coin-op has been turned into a dull and repetitive platform exercise with a bit of side-scrolling shoot-em-up in the middle.

The wonderful and atmospheric settings, the end-of-level bosses, the giant motherships, the strange creatures which populated the alien worlds have been left behind, and what we have is a mutilated version which lacks half of the levels of the original and will be completed by an average player on the third go.

One of the worst Spectrum coin-op conversions ever in my opinion, if not the worst.

A really dull and quite pathetic arcade conversion. Not worth playing.

Remarkably average !!

1988 ACE Software (UK)
by Christian Urquhart and Doc

I've seen worst side scrolling shoot 'em up's and I've seen way better. So this game falls below the average category to me. There are a few simple tweaks here and there that would have turned this into a proper conversion, like less monochromatic coloring and the saturated backgrounds which blends into the characters, or the slow and somewhat jerky movements. But it's still fun enough for a few plays

2,5 points

You have to beg your sprite to move before it actually does it.

2,5/5

Bad arcade conversion.

But I'm not gonna knock it too bad, as I paid the budget re-release price of £2.99 in 1989. Hilarious thing is I remember buying it from WHSmiths, and seconds before I picked it up on the shelf I'd seen one of the stockers move all the full price versions of this game they still had leftover infront of the budget versions.

I made a point of digging one out from behind the 5 or 6 large case £9.99 copies and saying "Oh this one's only £2.99!".

If looks could kill I'd have been dead almost 3 decades ago.

Anyway the game does not play much like it's parent machine at all, enemies just seem to be randomly thrown at you, or there's a mass bald spot when none come at all. The graphics are serviceable, but could have been infinitely better. I think the whole game is kind of there, but it seemed to loop back to the start after about 3 or 4 levels? I don't know if I missed something?

Not a great game but I have played worse conversions, and to be fair it's not too much damage done to the gaming world, it's not like Xain'd Sleena was a really well known arcade machine anyway. I'm left thinking half the people who played it probably didn't even realise it was an arcade conversion, and really Xain'd Sleena wasn't exactly a phenominal arcade experience anyway.