Xevious was the coin-op which brought respectability back to the pure shoot-'em-up. Just when the whole genre appeared played out, the combination of stunning graphics and imaginative gameplay made jaded fingers reach for the fire-button again. The Amstrad version of the game is very faithful to the original. The left hand side shows your score and remaining lives, while the main part shows the vertically-scrolling landscape from above. Your fighter moves freely over the landscape, zapping enemies and dropping bombs on ground emplacements. In the original, dropping bombs involved pulling back on the joystick while pressing the fire button, while here the bombs are dropped automatically; this seems to make things rather too easy. The graphics of the background are as good as anything I've seen on the Amstrad, with nice metallic gun emplacements, mobile tanks, whirling fighters and swarms of bombs. However, if you just keep zapping away it is a breeze, and I managed to complete the first several levels with little difficulty.  
A decent conversion, complete with the annoying four-note musical accompaniment, which will certainly disappoint no-one. However, competition from a number of similar games makes Xevious fail to stand out as much as it would have six months ago. Chris Jenkins , PCW
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