Freex

Your Spectrum

Dave Nicholls 1.5/5 MISS

Roger Willis 0/5 MISS

Ross Holman 2/5 MISS

JOYSTICK JURY All the latest software from around the houses! Passing judgement this month are Dave Nicholls, Ross Holman and Roger Willis. Our regular crew of software screw balls are in fine form this month. Draining the dregs of Christmas spirit are Dave Nicholls, the hairy hacker; JSW champion Ross Holman; and our own two-wheeled terror, Roger Willis. Just in case you find our scoring system too confusing, here's what it's all about. The score out of five at the end of each person's review is based on their own experience of the game. But that's pretty subjective... so, they also use the HIT and MISS system to indicate its potential as a commercial success. FREEX Software Supersavers £2.99 Ross: Freez is an Invaders/Galaxians clone with some 60 different stages. The display's split into two parts with a status panel (showing the score, lives left, and position in the game) on the left, and the playing area on the right. You control a gun ship which sits at the bottom of the screen with controls to move it left, right, up or down and, of course, fire. The ship will only go about half-way up the screen, but this is good enough to escape from most tricky situations. The aliens usually descend in groups of three or four and exhibit some very bizarre behaviour; some are easy to kill and some are not. After ten waves of attack, you move on to the next phase and get a credit life; here you face a whole new batch of aliens ... and this lot shoot back! On loading, you can choose to see a demonstration game; what you're not told, however, is that the demo takes about 50 minutes in all! It's good to see a company like Software Supersavers supporting not brilliant, but reasonable, pieces of software. Hopefully, it'll encourage the authors to produce better games.

Read it at Your Spectrum Unofficial Archive