Necronom

STORY / GAMEPLAY:
A.D. 3257. Mars for ages has been the place of refuge for every kind of persecutees. The rebel's headquarters (called the Octagon) situated in the valley of secrecy, show strength, self-confidence and reserve. The rebels start from here their activity of disturbance and destruction against the evil, the princes of darkness. It's the last bastion of insurgents summoning up courage and strength to oppose to the tyrants of the galaxy and letting them not subdued. But the power of resistance seems to decrease more and more. The fighting spirit is going to disappear. In the meantime the evil is preparing for the last decisive fight, and something must happen... It is you to fly a spaceship called Coracon 23-2, suddenly landed recently near Octagon. The rebels did not understood how this happened and who's the pilot, but none was found aboard! Coracon 23-2 though, found to be of very advanced technology and strong in terms of firepower, so the rebels decided to use it against the evil tyrants. The mission is to reach and destroy the enemy headquarters called Necronom, so that the hostile army would fall apart. But this needs first to be done, by flying through several military bases installed on several planets of the galaxy...
Ok, this is basically the story of Necronom, based on the game's manual. The game is a classic horizontal scrolling shoot-em-up, similar to a lot of other titles of the genre back then. The main game starts automatically after distributing a finite reserve of energy around the ship's attributes by means of a control panel with icons. Use this feature wisely though. During the game there are a few bonuses to collect which activate the bouncing bombs and the homing missiles or give an extra life. The shield works by pressing the RETURN button and the disrupter by holding down the FIRE button. At the end of each level you have to cope with a boss in order to get into the next level.
Gameplay is rather tough, and the fact that your ship's inertia and joystick response are both slow (even after upgrades), makes it even harder to progress further the levels (there are 32 levels available). Moreover, the speed of your guns is slow too, and I propose to use the auto-fire option on your joystick (or emulator) which at least will give you the chance to shoot down a few more incoming alien formations (otherwise, you've got no chance!). I think that Necronom starts too difficult and is too unappealing and unoriginal, dust yourself down early, and bother starting all over again. Other than its difficulty though, the game looks and sounds pretty cool.

GRAPHICS / SOUND:
Graphics are stylish, and it is obvious that a great deal of care and attention has been taken over them. The sprites are well animated while the backgrounds are partly animated. And there's a hell of a lot happening at once - sprites whizzing around all over the place, which doesn't slow down framerates at all (and as expected on the Amiga).
But the sound is, without a doubt, the most impressive part of the game. Apart from having a gorgeous intro sequence, each level holds a unique nicely composed high quality tune along with sample spot effects for every single shot and the standard boom type explosive noises.