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Zynaps

A visually appealing but cruel and punishing shoot 'em up.

In deep space evil alien forces are brewing and spreading fast across the galaxies. One lone star pilot decides to take on the alien mother ship and a desperate and long drawn conflict ensues.

Zynaps is a horizontally scrolling shoot 'em up. You play as the lone fighter ship battling all kinds of alien and robotic attack forces. The goal of the game is to destroy the alien mother ship and to do that you must battle endless hoards of attack drones through numerous locations.

With the game automatically scrolling from right to left, you'll be fighting everything that moves until you reach the end of the level. Enemies will come in various attack patterns, and there are even stationary turrets placed here and there – the action is quite intense and there's no room for breathers.
The game does bring some interesting features to the table however. Rather than simply just being another generic arcade style space shooter Zynaps is quite unique and has a lot going for it. For example, the order in which levels appear are randomized for each time you play. There are 16 different levels in all. There are power-ups that you can collect and these will upgrade your weapons or even arm you with various sub-weapons. And to top it off, it has some neat graphics.

Power-ups appear when you successfully destroy alien attack drones. Whenever you collect one such power-up, an icon at the bottom of the screen will change. This icon shows you what weapon upgrade you are eligible to select. In order to activate an desired selection you must collect another power-up with your “tractor beams” turned on. This is done by holding the fire button down, and obviously, while you're doing this you won't be able to fire your weapons. Selecting the same upgrade multiple times will typically empower that weapon further.

The upgrades that you can get are; Speed boosters, Rapid Shot, Air-to-Ground bombs, Air-to-Air missiles and Heat-seeking bombs.
Speed boosters will indeed alter the movement speed of the ship, but in this game high speed is as much of a hassle than it is of help. The more Speed boosters you'll collect the harder it is to avoid flying into obstacles, so it's really not a good idea to get more than one of these.
Rapid Shot upgrades will allow your standard cannon to fire more rapidly and this is the only weapon on the game that you can rely on. It does what it is supposed to and the same can not be said about the other weapons.
The Air-to-Ground bomb will fire a bouncing bomb that is supposed to take out ground targets. When it hits, it does seem to do formidable damage, but its slow fire rate and unpredictable bounciness makes it an ineffective choice.
The Air-to-Air missiles will enable a cross hair on the screen, but it doesn't seem to do anything. The launched missiles will try to hit its targets, but they seem to miss more than they hit. The rate of fire is also very low – you'd have to wait for perhaps three to five seconds between each missile launched.
The Heat-seeking bombs are the best sub-weapons in the game but they're still not as useful as the Rapid Shot upgrades. At a slow but steady rate your ship will fire a heat-seeking projectile that will destroy pretty much anything that it touches. Its ability to actually home in on enemies is debatable, but if you're lucky it will take out an entire attack squad with one single shot.

The fighter ship is hard to control because of how it moves – it has a slight difficulty to slow down its movement, so by momentum it will travel a few pixels further on the screen than what your joystick movement accounted for. Keeping in mind that your ship can only take one single hit before it explodes, you really must be able to move about with high precision. Much of this game takes place in narrow spaces so this does cause some annoying and unnecessary deaths.

Needless to say, Zynaps is a stupidly hard game. This is partly due to the controls, but also how relentless the enemies are. You're given three lives to beat the game, and you aren't allowed to adjust any of the game settings.
Enemies will fly around blindly on the screen and release projectiles your way in a steady stream. Dodging and feinting bullets is thus a big part of the game and it only gets worse the further you go. There are bosses in the game that are practically impossible to beat, and when you die you're thrown back to the beginning of the level with all your upgrades taken away. It quickly becomes a test of anger management because it is so very unfair.

Even though the variation on the enemies is good the game does become repetitive after a while. Replaying the same levels because you happen to die is only fun for so long. The various levels are basically only different backdrops and there really isn't anything in there that hooks you and encourages you to keep playing beyond the first few levels. Especially if you've played them through a couple of times already. It simply isn't rewarding enough.

Perhaps the best part of the whole game is the graphics. The animation is smooth and the whole game has a high level of detail. The explosions look flashy and the on-screen action is very vivid and fluid. In this particular game the Commodore 64 hardware also manages to display an impressive number of animated sprites on the screen without any hiccups or screen flickering. Zynaps is simply looking great.

The intro music is a dreamy almost ambient tune. The composition is genius but it doesn't really go well with the intense alien-busting action that this game portrays. During play there is no music whatsoever. Instead you're treated with some cool sound effects. While the sound effects are great as they are, the lack of music does leave a vacant, almost creepy atmosphere, and in the long run it falls rather flat.
The repetitious explosion sound of your space ship will quickly trigger a burst of frustration. It's almost as if it was mocking you.

Zynaps looks shiny and bright on the surface, but you only need to spend a few minutes with it before you realize how cruel and punishing it really is. The mad difficulty level could have been acceptable if it weren't for the sluggish controls. The multiple weapon choices does present an interesting aspect to the game, but the overall experience will probably not entertain you for long. Not even if you're a huge arcade shoot 'em up fanatic.