Galactic Invasion

Galactic Invasion is a Shooter game, developed by Silent and published by Microillusions, which was released in Europe in 1987.

It must have taken the chaps at Microillusions at least five seconds to come up with the name for this one! Galactic Invasion... it sounds like one of those early ‘home grown’ ZX81 games that almost filled the whole 1K memory.

The game is set in a couple of galaxies. Both players’ objectives are to find five parts of a missile with which they can destroy their opponents galaxy. A split screen shows the view from each player’s ship.

All the planets in the galaxies have satellites which can be shot to reveal a part of a missile. When a part has been found it must be flown into to pick it up. Sections of the missiles are colour coded, and as a whole missile must be the same colour there is a lot of flying and searching to do.

3D starfields have been around for years, but the programmers of Galactic Invasion have still not got the hang of it. Both stars and planets jerk around very unrealistically, not the sort of thing you expect from the Amiga. The packaging boasts ‘digitised sounds’, but digitised from what? A Spectrum? Galactic Invasion looks unimpressive but its worst point is that it is just so boring! Absolutely no excitement, tension or atmosphere is created and as a result is a real chore to play, from start to finish.