Your display is very detailed and thorough-something necessary in a 'twitch' shooter. How you allocate them makes the difference between winning and losing. The crystals sit in a reservoir which you can use to allocate to your health, or your engines or shields. Essentially, they're like tune-ups in a racing game. Collecting these allows you to do a number of things. Destroy an enemy and they release power crystals. The game takes place across 16 missions on s6ven worlds. The game's a first-person perspective blast-atom with visual and gameplay elements of Quake, Tunnel B1 and Blam! Machinehead, with a nice mix of strategy and all-out firepower. SHADOW MASTER is a frenzied 3-D arcade shooter with graphics that'll make your jaw hit the deck. On top of it all there's a sneaking feeling that the difficulty has been pumped up to disguise the fact that, ultimately, there's little here that you've haven't seen elsewhere. This wouldn't be so bad if the challenge set by the game wasn't so high it will test the patience of even the most gifted games player, with enemies seeming to materialise out of thin air and box you in before you've a chance to flee. The control of your tank/buggy thing could also be more responsive - at times it feels like it's sticking to the level walls, velcro-style, hindering any attempt to flee a savage onslaught. Just when you think you've twatted the end-of-level boss, you then find that you've got to backtrack through the silent battlefield in order to find another path to continue the level. For starters, the levels, while commendably big, are possibly too big. There are some unpleasant smells in Shadow Master's trousers, though. The gratuitous pyrotechnics and whiz-bang visuals are Shadow Master's strongest selling points. As you'd expect, if it's capable of blowing you up, you can return the favour. They range from organic, subtly Manga-style cyborgs, to giant scuttling spiders and insects, to ridiculously big robot dragons and death-spitting tanks. Likewise, the enemies in Shadow Master are quite unlike anything we're used to finding in games such as these. The backdrops and overall design of the levels are quite unlike anything we've seen before, adopting a Jow-tech tribalism which gobs in the face of your usual clanky Avens-influenced blue-collar military look. Though it's obviously a little chunky on your average unaccelerated machine, 3Dfx-equipped types will have their eyeballs inverted by the special effects and multiple light-sourced explosions. More than thisĪs with most Psygnosis games, Shadow Master is a glorious, up-your-shlrt and in-your-face graphics fest. However, the labyrinthine structure of the 16 vast levels, and a number of simple puzzles (though there's nothing more involving than activating the odd switch), do offer something more. Indeed, the swathes of enemies, the power-ups and the appearance of mid - and end-of-level bosses certainly evoke many of the conventions of the 1980s arcade experience. The development team are obviously trying to recreate the feel of an old-style arcade shoot 'em up, albeit within a 3D, first-person perspective environment. You play the game from within a versatile cross between a tank and a beach buggy, which is dropped onto various planets where your task is to shut down the enemy's operations on that world and liberate the cybemetically enslaved populace, or complete a similar objective within a time limit. Shadow Master is closer to Quake than Pax Imperia, but it's no Quake clone.
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'Us', in this instance, being a relatively peaceful colony world full of people who wouldn't lines of Pax Impend it could even be another Quake 2. Just for a change, a marauding force of alien life forms is cutting a deadly swathe of destruction through the galaxy - and they're heading right for us.