Hi there!

Ah, finally another Amiga shoot'em up!

This one's from Martech, the makers of one of my favorite C64 games of all time: Mega Apocalypse. They never really managed to deliver yet another game as good as that though, so they slowly went out of business. I think Phantom Fighter was one of their last games.

It is a mixed emotions experience. As you can see, the (animated!) background graphics are gorgeous for such an early Amiga game. The guy responsible for these superior drawings, Paul McLaughlin, would soon enough join Bullfrog afterwards.

Pretty much everything else in the game is rather generic. The music sounds like a soundtracker demo loop, and the enemy ships appear in randomized order, flying a handful of predictable patterns.

The game has five levels, 3 horizontal and 2 vertical, but they all play just the same. The endbosses are doing their job and the regular enemies are getting insanely trigger happy in the last two levels.

I did manage to beat it nevertheless, but unfortunately I can't present an ending screen: After beating the final boss the game dropped me into the Hiscore list...

Some future day the "Playing..." series may see another game with art from Paul McLaughlin in the form of "Treasure Trap", but first it'll continue with something else.

Greetings,

Manuel