Download OverKill - The Six Planet Mega-Blast

OverKill is a lesser-known space shooter from Epic MegaGames and a Canadian company called Tech Noir. Had anyone heard of it at the time, it would have been widely regarded as completely bonkers.

Overkill's gameplay revolves around your average vertical-scrolling shooter gameplay formula - shoot stuff, collect powerups, don't die, shoot some more stuff. As the title suggests, OverKill features all of these in large amounts. The powerup system, however, is anything but stereotypical. As you collect powerups, they cycle through Lasers, Missiles, Gadgets and Upgrades, showing you which powerups are available. You can then press the select button to give you the selected upgrade. Using this system you can progress from a basic fighter with a normal laser to a fully featured battle-cruiser with four sidearms attached, two drones floating around it, all of which are firing crazily powerful lasers, along with terrain-following missiles and yo-yo style seeking missiles.

Of course, even if you have an insane array of weaponry, it doesn't mean that it is easy to survive. Colliding with the terrain does a lot of damage, as does being shot by an enemy, or colliding with them. Of course, this works fine if you have, well, any weapon, because every enemy takes only one or two shots to kill. The difficult part is that your ship moves very slowly - slow enough that it is very difficult to get out of the way of a perfectly aimed stream of bullets, and that, at most, your ship moves sideways at the same rate that it moves forward at normal speed, or slightly more. That, and if you run out of fuel, you also die.

There are only six levels, and none of them will take very long. As such, the game has very little replay value. The graphics are EGA and very arcade-ish, and the sound and graphics are Adlib and MIDI, making OverKill feel a lot like an arcade game, and the controls feel very much as if they would work nicely with a joystick.

In conclusion, OverKill is a good game. It might not last very long, but for the time it does last, it will provide a blast comparable to better known shooters of a similar style; therefore I shall award it a well-deserved 4.