Wings Of Death

STORY / GAMEPLAY
You play the role of Sagyr the magician and you fly through multiple levels to avenge Xandrilia, a dark witch that transformed you into a creature that can change into a dragon, a griffon and an eagle (when you collect the relevant power-ups). Sagyr just wants to take back his human nature and destroy the witch forever! The game features seven levels of intense action and is one of the best shoot 'em up games for the Amiga and ST 16 bit home computers. On the way, you can find five different weapon systems plus additional bolt-on weaponry (Hunter, Destroyer, Shield, Auto-fire, etc). Note that there are fifteen types of bonuses to collect and each one can be gained as a power-up by killing an enemy! But beware since there are also some bonuses that may harm you i.e. by decreasing your weapons' power! Overall, this is a surely a very tough game since the enemies attack from all directions in a way that you just can't protect your dragon and you finally die! Difficulty level aside, this game is gorgeous and its success led the programmers to develop a sequel under the title “Lethal Xcess” in 1991, where you return to take revenge once more.

GRAPHICS
Wings of Death is considered one of the best games for the Atari ST computers and it makes a good use of the machine's capabilities, automatically detecting and putting into action additional resources like digital audio (DMA sound for the STE with better quality SFX) and the Blitter chip included in the newer ST models. The game's visuals look good and feature over 1 megabyte of graphics details! Note that all versions (ST, STE and Amiga) have 20+ colors on screen and almost identical backgrounds! The Eclipse Software team used a new sync-scrolling technique for the ST and STE computers with which you can switch from 50 to 60Hz and thus the game's scrolling speed will increase quite a lot (the Amiga version is smoother though without the need of such a technique!).

SOUND
Soundwise, Jochen Hippel composed another musical masterpiece! I really like the great music score at the intro/menu screen and also the in-game sound scores, speech synthesis and digitized sound effects. Wings Of Death is surely one of the most finely tuned games of the ST/STE library!