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 graphics on the DOS version are colorful and very well detailed but cannot compare to the Amiga version (even when running on VGA mode) especially in terms of animation and scrolling. Note that the game was developed to run on 8086 and 8088 Intel CPU-based PCs! The MS-DOS version supports CGA (4 colors), EGA (16 colors) and VGA graphics modes. Unlike the Amiga, the DOS version includes only the vertical scrolling levels. The graphics are good, even on CGA mode although some detail is missing compared to the EGA and VGA. The backgrounds and sprites are very well designed and give a pretty good impression. The sprites are big and polished and move smooth on screen without any framerate problems. What's quite impressive is the color-cycling in some levels (VGA mode only). The EGA and VGA graphics also include a bounding screen effect when gameplay starts. The sound is equally good with some nice in-game tunes along with several shooting and exploding sound effects.