System 3
£9.99/£14.99

Gritting your teeth with all the determination that made you the last hope for this bluey-green earth, you settle into your sleek starfighter to do battle for the last time against the scavengers and space mutant horrors floating high above the planet, poised on the final destruction of all civilization. All inhabitants of our planet are under a false sense of security thinking there's no threat to our very existence. How wrong they are. The loons!

As the only hero remaining of the once-glorious crack defence fighter pilot team, you take on the grotesque mutant creation set on destroying us. To crush this a candy you must brave the body defence mechanisms inside the creature so that you ma obliterate its sustaining organs, and once and for all put a stop this crazed hunger stampeding across the galaxy (is a bit like like Nick -Ed)

The game's split into part-horizontal and part-vertical scrolling. This adds some variety but doesn't make playing any easier. At the start your ship is armed with just the basic pulse canon, but icons can be shot or picked up along the way to give auto tire, lasers and even a cheat mode to help you defeat the aliens.

What can I say about Dominator that hasn't been said about every shoot-'em-up on the market? The graphics in the game aren't bad but you'll have seen similar ones literally hundreds of times before. There's one thing Dominator has to offer that many other blasting games don't though, animated scenery plus loads of colour, but lots of clash to go with it. Typical.

Puny sound effects and an avenge tune accompanying the action don't jolly things along at all. Dominator is one of those games you will either love or absolutely hate. If you like shoot-'em-ups of any shape or form, this may be for you.

NICK

Wayhey! Domination! Fnar, fnar! No, get off Nick, it's my turn now, your comment's finished. I don't know, eh? This sort of game has been done so many times before! OK, so it's got pretty good graphics, but that doesn't make a game; there needs to be some element of gameplay in it, and I'm afraid that Dominator is such old hat that all the addictivness has worn off on other games to which it bears such similarity. In its own right, it's a jolly good shoot-'em-up, and if you've spent the last five years locked away in a computerless environment, you might well find this excellent. I'm afraid I didn't though; how about an original idea next time, System 3, coz this one ain't gonna work!
MIKE

System 3
£9.99 cass/£14.99 disk
Reviewer: Sean Kelly

We've given you a Megapreview!! We've given you a playable demo!! In fact, we've given you everything except a review. So here it is!!! We're too good to you, we really are.

A monster is heading Earthward with the intent of absorbing all life forms in a bid to become the most sophisticated being in the universe. And why not, I say? I mean, it gets a bit lonely being so wonderful, it would be nice to have another sophisticated life form to chat with, I can tell you. But anyway, enough of my whinings and on with thee scenario. The monster is close to achieving it's ultimate aim, and only one thing stands between it and victory. Guess who. Yup - you.

All you have to do is climb into your ship, conveniently situated just inside the monster, and blast through four tortuously long levels of innards. You chunder your way through guts and ghoulies before coming face to brain with the alien's grey matter and blasting it into the equivalent of an EEC alien brain mountain.

You begin on Level One, a vertical scroller, where you have to progress upwards along a passage whilst all manner of nasties, resembling hearts and... er... other things, launch themselves in vicious waves at you. The passage grows gradually narrower, with ribs and chunks of what look like undigested cat food lining the wall. These will kill you instantly should you be unfortunate enough to come into contact with them. So steer clear! And don't forget the huge pulsating end of level nasty which you must blast to pieces before progressing onto the next level. Which is...

Level Two!!! You all know what this looks like 'cos YS had a playable demo of it on the front of the last issue. It's a horizontal scroller with even more horrible, gribbly things growing out of the walls trying to block your path. This time, mounds of mouldy flesh with eyeballs and gobs block your way, while even more things are attacking you. As you may guess, negotiating your way through is incredibly difficult, as the passages are extremely thin and demand absolute precision for you to progress. Add to this the attacking enemies, giant bees and whatever else, and you are in serious trouble. Levels Three and Four are more of the same, but with bigger, better and more numerous beasties to defeat. Fortunately, as with most games of this nature, there is a chance to 'tool up' by collecting the various 'power up' icons, which will give you such firepower as lasers, smart bombs and auto fire.

The graphics in Dominator are, it must be said, brilliant. The massive variety and animation of backgrounds and attack waves is amazing, and the nightmarish atmosphere created by all this is perfectly suited to the game. The scrolling is also spot on, as is the design and motion of your ship.

Unfortunately, your ship is not very versatile. It's size and lack of manoeuvrability mean that the grim reaper is forever lurking just behind you, waiting for the simplest mistake. Also when you die. It takes a long time to restart the game, about five or six seconds, which might not sound a lot, but when you are keyed up to play, seems like ages. And guess where it sends you when you die? Yup back to the start of the level. Aaaarrrggghh!! There's nothing worse than getting near to the end especially as it takes so long to get anywhere in Dominator, due to the slowest progression rate I can ever remember on the Speccy. Not the worst shoot 'em up ever, but by no means the best, that's for sure.

Label: System 3
Author: In-house
Price: £9.99/£14.99
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Tony Dillon

Neeeoow! Dugga dugga dugga! Multicoloured explosion follows multicoloured explosion as glorious technicolour ships bob and weave doing battle over a dream-world of colour fantasy and illusion. Well, not quite.

You are the Dominator, and you have to, well, dominate around a bit I suppose; rid the galaxy of the evil alien empire etc. And all set against a (relatively) fast (relatively) colour-clash free and pretty darn attractive in a fluffy strawberry sort of fashion, background.

Played across all of four levels, the game alternates, Salamander like, between side on and overhead view perspectives. The still graphics for both types of levels are equally impressive, or at least the backdrops are. All of the backdrops are animated in a sort of well animated kind of way, indeed there were points that made me sit back and go uurgh! The sprites have come across as well.

Take a look at the screenshots. First thing you notice is the large amount of colour. Now, you know as well as I do that a colourful game automatically looks a lot better than a mono one. Fair enough. So, to reassess the game, strip the colour. What are you left with. Some very badly designed sprites that move very badly. Um, OK. So what else has the game got?

Well, it does have a bolt-on weapons system. Fine. You can collect up to three extra weapons and an autofire facility. Good. These run out after a short period of time. OK, I can live with that. The weapons are pretty pointless. One of them bolts onto the back and fires diagonally behind you, but doesn't seem to have enough power to actually kill anything. The other two bolt on the front and fire forward, in unison with your cannon. The other two bolt on the front and fire forward, in unison with your cannon. Don't you think that, just maybe, this might be a little bit poorly designed?

Do I think this game is good? Yes, but not much. I think too much effort has gone into trying to add a little flair to a tried and tested idea and not enough though along the lines of "How can I make something original out of this game".

The main problem lies with the playability. The main ship moves quite fast, but due to poor design the game is just a little too difficult. Right from the start alien waves move in a way so that at certain points they more or less cover the screen, meaning you can't dodge or find a safe spot to fire from.

I had high hopes for Dominator. Oh well...

System 3 fail to dominate.

Does the world really need another horizontally scrolling shoot 'em up? That may seem like an unfair question. After all, the world may not have needed another beat 'em up or arcade adventure when System 3 launched International Karate and Last Ninja - but both games went on to become the standards by which these types of game are now judged.

Mark Cale, the controversial Ferrari-driving boss of System 3, clearly believes that Dominator will provide a third standard in the shoot 'em up department with the claim that it will "create a new genre in this type of home computer software" translated into three languages in the instruction manual. So does it? in three words -"NO", "Nein", and "Non".

The first level is the "Gateway" to the action - and the only vertically scrolling level. The usual assortment of power-ups are there for grabs: Rear Gun, Laser, Blaster Canon, and Autofire, but they hardly improve the playability.

Smart bombs and extra lives can also be earned by your intrepid space pilot - and these will come in handy as the game does get quite hard on the later levels.

Just as you would expect there are giant end of level nasties that will absorb stacks of laser fire before finally blowing up and letting you pass. The aliens do have fairly difficult attack patterns. They zoom in quickly, necessitating a speedy trigger finger if you are to survive. They all approach from the same side though - so at least you don't have to worry about sneaky ones coming from behind, as in R-Type for example.

That's really all there is to Dominator. It is the scrolling shoot 'em up that you have seen a dozen times before whatever computer you own. Its scant distinguishing features make an uncharacteristically disappointing launch from System 3.

Reviewer: Eugene Lacey

RELEASE BOX
Amiga, £19.99dk, Out Now
C64/128, £9.99cs, £14.99dk, Out Now
SPEC £9.99cs, £14.99dk, Out Now
Ams £9.99cs, £14.99dk, Imminent
Atari ST, £19.99dk, Imminent

Predicted Interest Curve

1 min: 55/100
1 hour: 60/100
1 day: 51/100
1 week: 35/100
1 month: 25/100
1 year: 0/100

System 3
Spec/AMS/C64 cassette £9.99, disk £14.99, ST/Amiga £19.99

Just when you thought the genre would collapse if another title was added to it, here's Dominator, the latest game in the "scrolling shoot em up with extra weapons" mould. So, what makes Dominator stand out from the crowd? Well, not a lot, but it does show that extra touch of polish which a lot of similar games lack.

You start the game in the pilot's seat of a mothership, flying through a vertically-scrolling landscape of mushy, organic material which exudes tentacles in your direction. Luckily, your spaceship is a nippy old jalopy and the whole screen is available as dodging space, which is a bit of luck because there are a whole host of nasty beastlets roaming around the ether.

You won't be surprised to learn that your ship is equipped with a laser, which deals death in large quantities to any alien in your sights. There are no extra weapons to be found on the first level, because the programmers viewed it simply as a trigger finger warm-up exercise to prepare you for the main event. First, though, you have to deal with the end of level fatty, a superbly-drawn pulsating heart which has to be pumped full of photons before it explodes.

At this point you take control of your attack ship (which looks exactly the same as the mother ship for some reason), the action turns through 90 degrees and you start on the long, horizontally-scrolling journey through the innards of stonking great space dragon.

Level two takes a similar form to level one in terms of background graphics. Large, wobbly pink blobs predomite, making the first half of the level look like a thousand melted mutants hanging together by their tendons. Blinking eyes and gaping maws also feature amongst the scenery, adding a further air of grotesqueness to the proceedings. Further on your surroundings gradually transform into a honeycomb, and the squirmy microbes which assail your ship are replaced by swarms of ferocious bees.

Shooting a whole group of aliens sometimes leaves behind a glowing B icon which, when shot, adds one of eight bonus features to your ship. Extra weapons include rear guns, which fire two shots backwards at on angle, a forward-firing laser cannon, a missile launcher (which comes in a remote pod in the Amiga version), a rapid autofire with a limited lifespan and a smart bomb. The Amiga version also features speed-ups. Bonus ships and points are also available. The weapon selection is automatic, the computer alternating firearms bonuses with smart bombs and extra points or lives.

The end of the level is marked by a mucus-dripping mouth which spits globules of acidic slime at your ship. A bit of dodging and blasting and that's the end of him. Cue next level.

Level three continues in an oral vein, featuring hundreds of nasty incisors blocking the route, and quite a few diseased cavities spitting out plaque bombs. As you continue through this level, the ulcerous mouth graphics give way to spiky, metallic claws and you have to fight your way through squadrons of spinning plates (haven't we seen those somewhere before?). The end of the level is inhabited by a large septic brain, which in turn is inhabited by rather nasty maggot. Yeuch!

On level four, the transition from organic to mechanical is complete. The landscape is a metallic one with squadrons of robots flying around the place. The final confrontation, oddly enough, is with a large frog, with a sticky prehensile tongue which lashes out at your ship until you fry its brain with a few laster bolts.

At certain points in each level, the scrolling stops and you're faced with an intermediate monster, not as big as the end of level beasts but just as nasty. These take the form of giant bees, cyclops octopods and alien foetuses, which weave about the screen hurling missiles in your direction, until you can loose off enough lucky shots to kill them.

Now, if this sort of gameplay sounds a mite familiar to you, your instincts serve you well. With the likes of Menace, Denaris, R-Type and Armalyte on the market, Dominator certainly is going to have its work cut out trying to carve a niche for itself.

But, even without originality on its side, Dominator still manages to impress. The addictive qualities of the action are on a par with the titles I've mentioned above, and while four levels may not sound like a lot, there is a lot of heavy-duty blasting to be done before you reach the end.

Graphically, Dominator is very good indeed, the sprites and backdrops being particularly impressive on the Spectrum version. The design of some of the uglier bits of scenery are distinctly reminiscent of certain recent horror films I've seen and blanched at.

The Amiga version's sound is a good as you could hope, with a funky title tune and some atmospheric in-game soundtracks. The programmers have included some strikingly good sampled sound effects, the best of which has to be the shrieking croak of the frog at the end of the fourth level, which increases in volume as you approach.

On the Spectrum at least, Dominator is one of the best shoot 'em ups around, probably the best I've seen since R-Type. The Amiga version is up against stiffer competition, but it holds its own with the likes of Menace and Denaris.

Whichever format you own, if you're a hardened shoot 'em up veteran, Dominator is a game to scour the shelves for.

Spectrum 48/128 Cassette: £9.99, Diskette: £14.99
Amstrad CPC Cassette: £9.99, Diskette: £14.99
Atari ST £19.99

No surprise from the ST: graphics of the same unusual design as the Amiga but a little lacking in detail, though scrolling and movement is fine. The Spectrum assigns different colours to neat scenery and different types of ship which generally works quite well. Near-misses with other objects sometimes cause attribute problems, however, and player missiles and resulting explosions are often of bizarre and changing colouration. Amstrad graphics are not a pretty sight. Although scenery uses colour well, it scrolls slowly and jerkily while blocky sprites take part in a game too awkward and boring to play. Sound on all versions is average for the particular machine but CPC effects are notably poor - piercing and messy.

Amstrad CPC owners steer clear; otherwise, Dominator is another in the long, long (long) line of decent but unremarkable shoot-'em-ups.