Entry posted by SpiceWare
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Star Fire, by Manuel Polik
5/5
You're a rookie pilot who is Earth's last hope against the Exidy Armada. Hidden amongst each attack wave are a few Exidy Freighters. The freighters are visible to the naked eye, but not to your instruments, so be on the lookout for them.
Star Fire starts out with a slick title screen, which once again has excellent music by Paul Slocum of Tree Wave. From here you can use SELECT or your joystick to choose the starting wave of 1-9. Hit Fire to start the game. Oddly enough, RESET only returns to the menu, it's not used to start a game.
Once the game starts use your joystick to fly around the sector and pick off the alien ships. The game uses standard flight controls, where pushing the joystick up causes your ship to fly down. You can change this if you wish by setting the Right Difficulty switch to A. Your laser generates a lot of heat, rapid fire can cause your laser to jam until the heat dissipates. It's not an issue in the first few rounds, but to do well in later waves you must learn to only shoot when you're guaranteed a hit. The Left Difficulty switch is used to control the amount of heat each shot generates. Setting to A causes the laser to heat up twice as fast, but with the added bonus of higher points for each enemy ship destroyed. The game play is excellent and keeps you coming back for more.
The graphics are very well done. The enemy ships are very detailed, so detailed that they use both of the Atari's sprites to draw each ship. The only downfall to this is there can at times be a lot of flicker. There are a number of different ship graphics, mostly inspired by Star Wars. The Tardis does seem out of place. 
Your ship can take 6 hits before the shields give up. Pick off an Energy Diamond to reenergize for one hit. Surviving the wave will also add back a hit. When you die, there's a really neat death sequence, along the lines of Battlezone.
The manual artwork by David Exton is top-notch.
Note: The letter and patch are for being the fourth member of the Star Fire Elite Squadron, a distinction earned for scoring over 3500 points.
Next up, Saboteur
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