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"The title makes no sense, but it's still fun..."

Intro:

Solar Fox was an enjoyable shooter made for the Commodore 64 in 1983. As in most old shooters, the objective is merely to earn points and advance through the levels.

Graphics: 6/10

For the C64, these aren't too atrocious. I could tell what everything was right away, unlike in a few C64 I've played. You pilot a white ship on a red grid, with four red enemies on the grid's sides. When you die, you're shown a nice explosion graphic. When you shoot an enemy, it either disappears without any transitional graphic, or it stops moving and changes shape temporarily. The only major problem I had with the graphics was that there was an ugly and obvious black box around the four outer enemies.

Sound: 6/10

The sounds are on par with most C64 games from the same era, and certainly nothing less than you'd expect. You get a nice little tune before each Rack(What the game calls each level), a beep when you attack, a boop when you hit something, and an explosion when you die. Nothing too fancy, and nothing to make your ears bleed.

Gameplay: 9/10

Like most old space shooters, this game is fun and hard to put down. You pilot a ship across a small grid, with four enemies surrounding you, one to the left, one to the right, etc. These fire small, fast rockets at you from the sidelines. You collect "fuzors", which give you points and end the level, like in Pacman games. Every few levels, something new starts up. Around level three, small blue enemies start to appear and go around the grid, and at about the same time small black portal like things appear that don't really do much, but can be destroyed. Eventually things like Fuzors that require you to fly over them twice and enemies extremely fast that, when killed, stun all four outlying ships.

To keep it from becoming too boring, every few levels you get a timed bonus stage. Collect all the Fuzors within the time limit and you get bonus points. It's almost impossible to accomplish on one of the available modes of play, Novice mode, where your ship is much slower than in Expert mode. In addition to these two modes, you can also choose your amount of starting extra ships, but you can only choose three or seven.

Final Recommendation:

If you ever have the chance to buy this game, do so. I wouldn't say it's good enough to go out of your way looking for it, but it's definitely worth a few bucks if you get the opportunity.


Reviewer's Score: 7/10 | Originally Posted: 04/12/06