STORY/GAMEPLAY:You get a distress call from the colonies around planet Regulus, which are under attack by alien forces. The GEM council reacts quickly and decisively, and order their entire space force into action. Unfortunately, that turns out to be just one Lightforce fighter, on deep space patrol, and, as luck would have it, it's piloted by you...
The game is a classical top-down vertical shoot em up, where you fight against hundrends of battle-ready alien ships, ground-based weapon installations and energy domes. Control centres also appear every so often, and shooting them all gives you extra lives at the end of each of the five levels, ranging from a jungle section, an asteroid belt, an ice planet, desert planet, and ends at the aliens' factories.
Lightforce offers pretty good graphics and sound effects, and it’s a challenging game, whether you’re a novice or a hardened shoot-’em-up fan.
GRAPHICS/SOUND:Although its colorful backdrops and nicely done sprites, the game suffers a bit in terms of framerate. As happened on almost any CPC vertical-scrolling shoot em up games back in the days, vertical scrolling here is not as smooth, because of the CPC hardware's fill-rate limitations (Z80 and only 16Kb video memory) and thus, constantly re-drawing pre-generated content (note that, to get truly smooth scrolling is by updating your screen every frame, at 50Hz framerate!). Those issues could be addressed by getting help via reprogramming the CRTC, as it happens nowadays and found in a few nicely done demos and indie-retro games or remakes for the CPC. Sprites move relatively smooth on screen but quite slow. The same slow-downs goes when firing your lasers, making quite tricky to target and destroy the incoming enemies, especially when attacking fast and in a twisting or spiraling pattern.