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

Story

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

The Game

Zynaps is a horizontally scrolling arcade style shoot ’em up. You play as the fighter ship called Scorpion battling all kinds of alien and robotic attack forces. The goal of the game is to destroy the alien mothership and to do that you must fight through countless hoards of attack drones and other threats through numerous locations.
Zynaps features a rather advanced power-up system and a couple of different sub-weapons that will help in this hopeless fight.

Controls

When starting the game you’ll quickly notice that the controls are a big problem. The Scorpion ship is hard to control because of how it moves – it has a slight difficulty of slowing down its movement, so by momentum it travels a bit further on the screen than what your joystick movement accounted for. It slides around on the screen and is practically impossible to control with any precision, quickly. What’s more, it also has a slight speed-up phase before reaching its full movement speed, making the controls even more difficult to handle. This gives the controls a soapy feeling that really amps the difficulty of the whole game up.

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. The hitbox, that detects collisions with the ship is huge – perhaps even larger than the ship on the screen! Much of this game takes place in narrow spaces so this does cause many annoying and unnecessary deaths.
There is also numerous homing missiles shot at you that you must dodge, and these cause huge problems due to the controls too. You can get used to the controls to some extent, but for a shooting game it has to be said that these controls are certainly not in favor of gameplay quality.

Content

With the game automatically scrolling from left to right, you’ll be fighting anything that moves until you reach the end of the level. You must be ready to dodge obstacles almost all the time. Enemies will come in various forms and attack patterns, and there are even stationary turrets placed here and there – the action is quite intense and there’s little to no room for breathers.
The game features about 12 different stages and each stage has a boss of some kind waiting at the end. From what we can tell, the game does not actually have an ending, but instead just loops the same stages over and over. There are power-ups that you can collect and these will allow you to upgrade your ship in various ways.

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 which upgrade you are eligible to get. In order to activate a desired selection you must collect another power-up with your ‘fuel scoop’ 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. You’ll see that the ‘fuel scoop’ is activated when the Scorpion ship starts flashing. Selecting the same upgrade multiple times will typically empower that weapon or upgrade further.

The upgrades that you can get in Zynaps are as follows;

• Propulsion – will increase the movement speed of the ship, but in this game high speed is incredibly difficulty to control. The more Propulsion 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, if any.
• Pulse Lasers – will allow your standard cannon to fire more rapidly and this is the only weapon in the game that is reliable. It does what it is supposed to and the same can not be said about the other weapons.
• Plasma Bombs – a sub-weapon that fires 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.
• Homing Missiles – a sub-weapon that enables a crosshair 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.
• Seeker Missiles – the best sub-weapons in the game but they’re still not as useful as the Pulse Laser 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 formation with one single shot.

Over time, your upgrades will deteriorate and this is indicated on the HUD. You’ll see that your Propulsion and Pulse Laser have two separate bars which indicate your current power level. When the icon starts to flash, it is about to be downgraded. This forces you to manually maintain your desired level of upgrades at all times, collecting new power-ups to accommodate for the loss over time.

Needless to say, Zynaps is a difficult game. This is partly due to the controls, but also how relentless the enemies are. 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. Some of the bosses are pretty hard to beat, and when you die you’re thrown back to the beginning of the level with most of your upgrades taken away.
You’re given three lives to beat the game, and there are no options to adjust when it comes to difficulty level or anything like that.

Zynaps does features a high score table, which is always a nice to have feature in any arcade style game. It also has a two player mode in which you take turns playing.

Even though the variation of the enemies is okay 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 there to really hook you and encourage 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 enjoyable enough.

Graphics

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 great and the on-screen action is very fluid. In this particular game the Commodore 64 hardware manages to display an impressive number of sprites on the screen before it starts to slow down the frame rate. Slow downs happen occasionally when there’s lots going on at the same time, but it should be said though that this is handled very well. It makes everything slow down equally, giving you more time to react and position yourself. In a way, it can even be helpful.
Overall Zynaps is simply a great looking game.

Sound

The intro music is a dreamy, almost ambient tune. The composition is great 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 background music does leave a vacant, almost creepy atmosphere, and in the long run it falls rather flat.

Summary

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 difficulty level could have been acceptable if it weren’t for the sluggish controls. The multiple upgrade 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.

Developed By: Hewson
Published By: Hewson Consultants
Version Reviewed: Commodore 64
Genre: Shoot ’em Up
Players: 1-2 (Hotseat)
Released: 1987