Phantom Fighter

STORY / GAMEPLAY
Combat the Korts and free the lost settlers on an alien planet that resembles Mars. You fly through a variety of stages from spooky caverns to sandy dinosaur graveyards and lava volcanoes in either horizontal (Amiga only) or vertical scrolling levels with a rotund, and nicely polished in copper, spaceship. Aliens attack in waves and in random (!) formations swirling around you! These formations are not so common and predictability is quite low making this game a constant and difficult challenge. Destroying an attacking formation will a leave bonus weapon pod and shooting this pod will cycle through various bonuses like speedup and a firepower add-on like multiple shots, homing missiles, side shots etc. The perspective switches from horizontal to vertical while progressing (i.e. level one is side-scrolling while level two is vertical). At the end of each level there is always a big boss to confront! The enemy pilots move way too fast and always towards you, spitting bullets at the same time. More on that, they appear from random areas of the screen so there is no safe place to hide! This makes it hard enough to evade either the aliens or their gunfire. And you only have five, one-shot-resistance lives (no energy bar here).

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The game's graphics are colorful and very detailed. Although there is no parallax scrolling, the backgrounds and sprites are very well designed and give a pretty good impression. The enemy sprites are big and polished and move smooth on-screen without any framerate issues. An impressive aspect are the color-cycling effects in some levels i.e. in level 2, the desert sand is animated, resembling a sandstorm! Note that there are some impressive static pictures in HAM mode (4096 colors) in every loading screen. The sound is good, with some nice in-game tunes along with a variety of shooting, sampled sound effects.

GAMEPLAY SAMPLE VIDEO
On our shoot 'em up compilation video below you may watch Phantom Fighter at 00:20.