SpaceChase *Re-reviewed* (Apollo)
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Entry posted by DoctorSpuds
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I’ve been thinking back to my Spacechase review that I posted all the way back in June, it was my second review and I feel it is one of my worst. There is almost no talking about the game itself just me bashing it for being a bad game, and holy crap the second and fourth paragraphs are just one sentence each! That’s terrible! So I think it’s about time to go back and give this review a facelift.
Spacechase by Apollo is an unabashed and shameless copycat of Demon Attack that totall- Wait what? Spacechase came out before Demon Attack? Well then that changes things somewhat. Spacechase is Apollo’s bestselling game and for a fairly predictable reason, vertical space shooters were in. Space Invaders had released on the 2600 the previous year, 1980, and became the new ‘Killer App’, and Apollo knowing that this was the new hotness decided to jump on the bandwagon and holy crap they picked the perfect year for it. For 3rd party releases Spacechase was the first vertical space shooter on the market, beating similar games like Demon Attack, Astroblast, and GORF by a year and even beat Atari’s Phoenix and Space Invaders’ sequel Galaxian. Spacechase filled a small void in this particular genre of games and since this was indeed the IN game of the time I can understand why it sold like hotcakes. Unfortunately this still doesn’t make Spacechase a very fun game, and now it’s time to really delve deep into it, let’s start with the graphics (like we usually do).
That background must have blown people away in 1981, heck it’s still pretty impressive even now, but that’s where the creativity ends unfortunately. Ship designs are basic, really basic; enemy ships are large chunky shapes that vaguely resemble a spaceship, or in later difficulties they are also green faces or even the face design of a Creeper from Minecraft (not exactly but still remarkably similar). The friendly ship, you, looks like a blue Christmas tree, I can’t imagine it as anything else, you’re a big blue Christmas tree shooting green faces and Creepers in space. Credit where it’s due, I do like the amount of movement they managed to get on screen, games like Demon Attack and GORF have a tendency to make me a bit sleepy since it’s only the enemies doing the moving against a black background and nothing else, but now that there’s a moving background I have something else to direct my gaze towards which is highly appreciated.
This game has the bare minimum for sounds; you have your basic shooting sounds that are different for both the enemies and yourself, and an explosion, that’s pretty much it. I do have to remark on the rather odd explosion noise though; it’s different from your standard crunchy explosion sound, instead of a chunky kaboom you get a hissing trilling explosion that is minimal on the necessary amount of crunch needed for a proper explosion sound effect.
Gameplay is as basic as can be, you shoot the enemies as they move side to side above you and occasionally they fire back. The enemy movement speed and firing rate changes as you get more and more points though I’ve never found a difficulty threshold that makes the game impossible. Strategy is minimal usually you can get by pretty well by holding the fire button and waiting for an enemy to intersect with one of your shots. Something I brought up before was the choppy enemy movement and even though it doesn’t harm the game’s playability it really just makes the game feel like it’s running slowly or at half speed. As noted earlier there are three different enemy types the basic purple ship thing that appears in groups of four, the green faces that appear in groups of five, and the black bug-like things appear in groups of six. The different variations do little to spice up the bland gameplay, you can chose between getting more points per enemy or less points per enemy, starting on any of the three enemy types, or having a daytime or nighttime battle where the background turns blue, as well as turn based multiplayer. You can also change your shot speed with the difficulty switches but as far as enemy behavior or other difficulty settings you’re out of luck.
Apart from the cool background Spacechase is a big ‘ol nothingburger of a game, it brings nothing new to the table, it doesn’t shake up the formula in any particularly unique way and even though it was second out of the gate it’s still last overall. There are plenty of these on Ebay if you don’t already have a copy, they’re absolutely everywhere, loose copies range from $7-$20 and boxed copies are usually around 25 dollars in varying states of destruction. There is only one reason why I won’t send Spacechase to the Collector’s Zone and that’s due to its commonness, chances are you already have a copy laying around, it’s just one of those universal games that manages to wriggle its way into everybody’s collections.
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