Zynaps

STORY / GAMEPLAY
This horizontal scrolling shoot 'em up features 16 levels with 450 screens of great action in total. By destroying enemy squadrons you can collect numerous power up tokens that can be used to obtain better weapons, including ground attack lasers, speed up pods and multi-firing. Extra lives are available as well (and you'll certainly need them, especially as you have to go a long way back when losing a life). Zynaps is a really tough game that needs a lot of skills to play. Its story is not an original one: It's just your spaceship against a number of alien threats but it's nicely put together with clear, finely detailed, graphics and smooth animation.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The ZX Spectrum version features nicely animated sprites and quite detailed foregrounds. The game's scrolling is quite satisfying, smoother than the CPC but not as smooth as on the C64 version! A drawback on the ZX (also spotted on the CPC version) is the collision detection, which is quite problematic as you may unexpectedly crash in some foreground objects. The sound on thye ZX is quite decent too (although it does not utilize the capacity of a 128k ZX model). It includes a nice introductory tune whilst there are several sound effects during gameplay.