Highway Hunter

It's six years since the Axis of friendly planets took over the earth and started terraforming it. Unfortunately. terraforming kills all the human life.

You play one of the rebels - a sort of "No Terraforming in Godaiming" protester - who has been sent to prison for rehabilitation. Instead of concentrating on an Open University Sociology degree, you help the Axis design a brilliant combat machine called the Multi-Attack Super Turbo Energy Ranger: one of those weapons where the designer works backwards from the acronym. Then you break out to punch through the security, rejoin the "Save Tring From Terraforming" lot and save the world. Easy peasy, right?

Highway Hunter is a vertical scrolling game, like Galaxians. There is a difference in that you have to negotiate bends and curves on the highway, but basically you shoot things and collect power ups. These range from simple weapons and shield units to things that make you invincible or destroy everything else in view. There are nine available weapons, and as you find weapon upgrades, your current weapon increases in power. If you exceed the amount of power your current weapon can handle, your weapon will be upgraded to the next available weapon. But weapons take energy and if your upgrade runs out of energy, your weapons system will revert back to the next lower weapon.

The shareware version has one episode. Evil Drivers, with five levels. Registration brings another two episodes (The Lost Roads and Anarchy) with a manual and a bonus disk. The program was written by the Omega team from Russia, and they have produced a good, smooth-scrolling blastfest with great sound. It's designed for a 386 or faster machine but you can alter the speed of the game to match your computer (or your reflexes).

Unfortunately, after Descent, the rest of this month's games are going to look a bit sad. Highway Hunter is a perfectly respectable shoot 'em up that would have got top billing any other time.