Mastertronic
£2.99

What makes a shoot 'em up a definite commercial success? There must be some reason for the sheer number of mediocre ones on the market these days! Canyon Warrior is nothing special, although it does have one nice innovation.

Gameplay is about as predictable as possible; fly up the vertically scrolling landscape shooting the aliens and picking up the extra weapons, and blast the fat alien to get on the next level, where the process is repeated, and so on until you get to the fourth, at the end of which is the extra 'ard alien mothership. Yawn.

The nice bit is the map editor which allows you to play around with the first three levels. This feature is particularly handy when Nick goes out to make the coffee; we remove all the nasties and get a fab and generally characteristic high score, then put all the alien gun turrets we can fit onto the first level so Nick can't play it (as if he could play it anyway!). Ho ho. Anyway, that's about the most appealing thing about Canyon Warrior. The rest of it is the proverbial old hat.

BARGAIN BASEMENT

Never a man to miss out on a spicy low-pricey, Jonathan Davies sifts through this month's batch of good, bad and downright ugly budget games.

Mastertronic Plus
£2.99
Reviewer: Jonathan Davies

"The alien High Command's base has been found, your task is to find the mothership then blow it to pieces."

Apart from earning its author a slapped wrist for poor use of punctuation (I'd have tried a semi-colon) (Sure Jonathan. So what's that apostrophe doing in the possessive adjective 'its' on your first line?! Prod Ed): Er... um... yes, well... okay... apart from earning its author a slapped wrist for poor use of punctuation, that sentence should serve as an omen of what's coming next. For Canyon Warrior is none other than a stereotyped vertically scrolling shooter, complete with add-on weaponry and an editor for the first three levels.

That's it, really. In comparison with the rest of them, this one fares pretty well. It's fast, slick and tidily presented. There are some good zappy sound effects on the 128K version, and the editor is quite good fun. The one in the game, I mean, not boring old Matt. The only real cause for concern is that the various levels are all a bit samey so the desire to keep battling onwards tends to be quickly replaced by a desire to hit the Reset button.

A harmless enough effort, but I can't see myself loading it up again in the near future.

Mastertronic
Spectrum £2.99

Scream up the canyon! (Silence)! Let rip with your laser cannon! Klik! Take out those spaceships! Thputch! It's a shame the Spectrum's sound generator can't provide shoot 'em ups like this with the oomph to shell shock the player, because in all other respects Canyon Warrior is a riotous blur of blasting.

There's a sizable horde of marauders to murder and even a few weapons to pick up, but the small screen area leaves no leeway in the canyon for klutzy pilots. Its dead easy to shoot the pick-ups before you get to pick them up, and even easier to crash and get sent way back down the level. Aieeee!!