Activision
£9.99

Another obscure Sega coin-op licence joins the growing rank produced by Activision over the post few months. Be the brave pilot chosen to fly the most sophisticated pleas of aeronautical technology ever created (the Sonic Boom) into enemy territory: six vertically scrolling levels bursting with deadly weaponry. And why? The usual domineering fanatic group have taken over all the military bases of the world. Wow!

Waves of aircraft rocket down the screen at you, ground-based gun hints and SAM sites blast away - weave to avoid them while trying to hit them with your rather ineffective weaponry. Thank god, some destroyed plane formations drop parachutes: red ones bestow spirit jets (a bit like the outriders from Scramble Spirit), whilst yellow ones supposedly increase firepower. Each level ends with a mechanical monstrosity to destroy: a top-of-screen meter gives the amount of shots needed to destroy it. That achieved, you're presented with your hit rate and bonus points and moved to the next battleground.

Sonic Boom - more sonic whimper - is a multi-load cassette that makes you wait for good mono graphics, clearly visible sprites but only average shoot-'em-up action not geared to set the world alight.

MARK [55%]

Yes it's one of my favourite game styles, a shoot-em- up, and of course totally unoriginal. It plays exactly like Slap Fight and Scramble Spirits: fly around the screen shooting everything coming towards you, collect the occasional power up icon to add extra super weapons or extra lives - you know the kind of thing. Small, neat sprites and highly detailed backgrounds all in the same monochrome colour plus OK sound with the usual 'boom' effects and a tune on the title screen all add up to a predictable production line clone.
NICK [63%]

Activision
£9.99 cass/£14.99 disk
Reviewer: Matt Bielby

(Yawn.) Oh sorry, didn't see you there. I'm afraid I was just dozing off. You see, Sonic Boom has to be the most snooze-worthy game I've seen in weeks. It's almost criminally boring. (And at £9.99/14.99 rather criminally overpriced too! There are much more entertaining budget games around, for goodness sake.) But hold on! Let's rewind for a smattering of plot and stuff before we go any further.

What we've got here is a very traditional six-level shoot-'em-up based on a minor (extremely minor) Sega coin-op. It's a vertical stroller, with oodles of enemy planes, tanks and so on coming at you in waves and a giant end-of-level nasty on each stage. Yup, it's just like 1943, Scramble Spirits and a million others (just not as good).

So what's gone wrong? Well, to kick off, it's becoming increasingly difficult to get excited about straight shoot-'em-ups any more, even the good ones - there've simply been too many. You need something really special to get a decent review in YS these days - an R-Type say, or a Xenon. And then there's the old problem with vertical strollers on the Speccy anyway - tiny monochrome planes plus complicated monochrome backgrounds equals total disaster. And Sonic Boom is just such a case in point. The unremarkable sprites may be reasonably clear most of the time. but the bullets certainly aren't! For ages I thought I must be flying into some extra-tall buildings or invisible walls when my plane kept blowing up for no reason, but no, Activision assured me otherwise. I just kept getting hit by all-but-invisible bullets, that's all. How frustrating.

As with many of these things, each level has a theme to it - on the first you have to fly over a city, then reach the sea and do battle with a giant aircraft carrier, on the second you cross some pipelines, then take on an oil rig and so on. Submarines, giant dams. even a sci-fi backdrop all crop up sooner or later, which makes it sound like there's a lot of variety. There isn't. This is uninspired Speccyvision we're talking about here, and everything looks practically the same.

Graphics aside, gameplay isn't, perhaps, too bad (in a very samey sort of way). The main point of interest, I guess, is the selection of bonus weapons you can build up (using icons collected from shooting down baddie 'waves'). These take the form of extra wings that attach to the sides of your plane - up to four are collectable, adding such goodies as backwards-firing shots and more powerful smart bombs, the best being a wall of death that crushes everything on-screen.

It's quite a hard game too (and not just because of the invisible bullets), though probably not quite as difficult as the coin-op version (which was blooming impossible apparently). As such, it might prove quite a challenge to the more determined shoot-'em-upper. Not for me though - I found it a real test of will to keep going past the big aircraft carrier (the first end-of-level nasty). I'd simply lost all interest by then, but persevere I did, just to make sure things didn't suddenly get better. And they didn't. (Honestly, the things I do for you readers.)

So what's it all mean, eh? Has Activision, one of the biggest software houses in the country, nay, the world, suddenly gone terminally crap? Well no, not really. It's just that theirs is the sort of deal-making that buys great big wodges of arcade licences at once, scooping up a few crappish ones that Sega (or whoever) couldn't really have sold otherwise along with the potential mega-hits. All we're doing here, folks, is indirectly paying the price for Power Drift.

And so to the conclusion. Um, what can I say? if you really like shoot-'em-ups then you may (just may) get some fun out of Sonic Boom. Otherwise, well, I played it on auto-pilot and they probably wrote it on auto-pilot, so purchase at your peril.

Label: Activision
Price: £8.95
Reviewer: Jim Douglas

The problem with producing top-bottom scrolling blasts these days is that, since everyone has had a number of successful stabs at the genre, you really can't get away with anything which doesn't have a revolutionary new angle.

Sonic Boom, Activision's latest fighter-Jet coin-op conversion unfortunately falls just short of this admittedly tall order.

Two immediate problems come to light on loading. The first is that you have to load each level individually, even on 128k machines. Should you lose all three lives on level 3, for example, and use up your "continue" credits, you have to rewind the tape, load in level 1 and start all over again. The second irritant is that, unlike the coinop, there is no two player option. No team-up chocks-away bravado here.

So a tape-straining solitary mission of death and destruction is all Sonic Boom can offer.

SB isn't bad looking at all boasts a variety of heavily protected installations for you to destroy (loopy fanatics having taken control of a bunch of military bases). There are swooping waves of enemy jets which barrel-roll out of the sun toward you. You have extra "spirit" fighters which fly along side and fire on your command. And when you hit a fuel depot, it bursts into a visually appealing fireball.

In fact, it's betwixt the twin stools of graphical excellence and visual clarity that Sonic Boom so frequently falls.

Enemy bullets are so successfully camouflaged while passing over the intricate backgrounds, that it's actually quite rare that you know what's just killed you.

At the end of each level, you must defeat a (really rather predictable) big-thing-that-fires-a-lot. Defeat this gargantuan piece of military kit and you get to (load from tape) the next level.

Personally, I find the less than excellent joysticks available for the Spectrum virtually useless for games requiring such instant response and accuracy. Redefining the keys is a bit of a curiosity, though. Since you can't redefine the Quit and Pause keys (Q & P) the world-famous QAOP - Up, Down, Left, Right set-up has the unfortunate result of pausing the game every time you try to fly right and quitting every time you try to fly towards the top of the screen.

The flight of the enemy planes and your own Super weapon; a sort of circulating circle of discs affair, are triffic. The baddies swoop around in their jets and their tanks truncle along the debris-strewn pathways. And your spinning weapons spins most impressively.

Spectrum £9.99
Amstrad CPC Cassette: £9.99, Diskette: £14.99
Commodore 64/128 Cassette: £9.99, Diskette: £14.99
Atari £24.99
Amiga £24.99

THIS FEAT IS TECHNOSONIC

Those mag-ni-fi-cent men in their fly-ing ma-chines, They go up tiddy-up-up, they down tiddy-down-down. Up , down - etc etc.

Or if I'm at controls, they go up for a depressingly short time before crashing down-sodding-down-down. Either because of my general ineptness at steering the thing or failure to avoid the missiles being pumped out by aliens, terrorists, obscure Eastern countries or over-ambitious clay pigeon shooters.

In Sonic Boom (completely unrelated to a similarly named Westworld song - whatever happened to them?), the nasty creatures that will shoot you (and definitely me) down belong to the second category, terrorists. To be more accurate, they're fanatics (of what I'm not to sure - probably blue Smarties), which are like terrorists except raving mad. Anyway, these violent loonies have taken over important military from all around the world, and only one suicidal mug can stop them. Yup, you. However, if you've got one of them gadgi 16-bit machines, you and a friend can tackle them together; in my case, though, I had to settle for Corky Caswell.

As Sonic Boom is a shooty-shooty game, it needs little explanation. Shoot things (things: planes, tanks, gun emplacements, aircraft etc), avoid other things (other things: things plus bullets, missiles, fireballs etc), and collect the occasional parachute. Red parachutes give cute little drone planes to follow you around and strengthen your 'supershot', a powerful spinning weapon that refreshes the parts your cannons can't. Yellow parachutes award an extra supershot.

Unless there's something particularly different about them, there's very, very little you can say about shoot-'em-ups which hasn't been said many, many, many times before. Sonic Boom is firmly positioned in that category. No dazzling add-on weapons, no inventive end-of-level monsters, no clever new features... 'just' some hectic blasting and dodging.

Although there are only six levels, Sonic Boom is no pushover. Once you get the feel of the attack formations, level one is easy but following that you're in for a challenging time, even in two-player mode; the bullets really do fly - and lots of 'em! Lucky there's a continue play option, though it can only be used five times in a row.

Sonic Boom is the best new shoot-'em-up this month, so if you're in the market for a blaster, put it on your list of games to try.