Phelios

The action is fast and furious, with a huge variety of environments and enemies, and of course the pick ups to butcher them with. With a health bar of only three hits, and only room for one more, it is challenging.

The levels vary greatly in style. Almost each level contains at least one scene where you have to employ a special strategy to succeed. These special tasks considerably spicen up the gameplay, even though some of them could have been implemented better. A good example for this is the last stage, where you have to collect all the letters of the word “PHELIOS” in order to upgrade your charge shot.

The backgrounds are incredibly well done, with all sorts of fine tuned details. In the levels where you are flying over rivers and lakes, you can see individual clouds moving past at various speeds. The bad guys themselves look pretty cool as well. They are all different, although some sprites are reused with different colours. They move smoothly though, and the variety is incredible and fitting to each stage. In the first level, there are large dragons which fire a trio of fireballs at you, while in the second level which sees you flying through a cave, there are all kinds of wall crawlers which are trying to knock you out the air.

Apollo could admittedly look better. He has very few animations, which each have very few frames. They could have spent more time on him, but then it has to be remembered that this is an old game, and it would have been harder to add any more frames without it looking cluttered.

Bosses are very well done, sticking with the idea of greek mythology, with Medusa, Cerberus, and Siren amongst others.

The music in Phelios is good, and has a large variety and adds a lot of effect ESPECIALLY in the ice caves level. Sound effects in Phelios are also impressive. The soundtrack ranges from upbeat, exhilarating tunes (during the high-flying levels that take place in the sky) to intense, intimidating tracks (often played inside of dungeons or caverns). The sound effects are surprisingly solid; shooters can often get annoying when you are forced to hear your screeching laser cannon being fired over and over again, but Phelios manages to keep the effects simple and subdued.