HUDSON SOFT

22 FEBRUARY 1991

It's the year 2020 and, yet again, the earth has to defend itself against evil forces. So get into your spacecraft and plug some bad guys! One of the few games for the Supergrafx, this gives the machine the opportunity to show what it can do with a horizontally scrolling shooter. But does it?

Gameplay is fairly standard fare - the occasional enemy drops an item for you to collect. These can be either speed ups, weapon power increases, gun pods that follow you and can be set to attack enemy craft, or weapon types. The weapons are pretty unimaginative - there is a forward firing laser, a green ball spread shot and diagonal laser that powers up into a handy 'loop shot' that tracks the scenery above and below.

The levels are, to be honest, pretty bland. The graphical style is a little rough and the once you've seen the first screen in a level, you can be sure that's all it's got to offer. One thing of note however is the design of the bosses. These are all pretty big and nicely drawn - it's just a shame that they don't offer much to uplift the gameplay as their attacks are fairly predictable and they take just a little too long to destroy at times.

As with most Supergrafx games, Aldynes doesn't make use of the hardware and doesn't really show us anything that a standard PC Engine can't do. Graphics are average, sound is average and while the game isn't bad, it's really nothing special and there are plenty of shooters that surpass it in every respect.