Babylon 5: Shadow Wars

The Good
It's the only one of its kind

The Bad
Just about everything else

The Bottom Line
Shadow War is Sound Source Interactive's attempt to cash in on their B5 exclusive license. The multimedia collection is subpar (wallpapers are only 800x600), videos are short, sounds are short... And the game... Please, it's a disgrace to give it the B5 name, but let's leave that aside for a moment.

Shadow War is your typical Galaga clone, albeit with B5 ship. You start in a Starfury, and your objective is to blast incoming bad guys before they can harm you or the station. B5 can take only so many hits, and it just wanders along the bottom, bouncing from one screen edge to the other. You however, can move left, right, even a bit up and down. Enemies like Drak just drifts over from top of screen and shoots at you randomly. Your shields can take a few hits... But later waves includes tougher enemies with more powerful shots, including Shadow ships that shots the heavy beam... However if you manage to survive for 10 levels, you get the Whitestar, which is quite a bit more powerful than the Starfury.

There really is no more to this game, other than the enemy occasionally pulls off special manuevers, like coming back UP the screen from the bottom instead of only go down, then reappear from the top. You just keep doing each level, getting a slightly bigger "station bonus" each time for keeping B5 in one piece, and see how long you can last.

This game must be run in 256 color mode, and thus, looks horrible by modern standards.

All in all, this is a novelty game that wears thin within 5 minutes. It's only claim to history would be the ONLY officially released B5 game in existence. And it's sad that B5 has came down to this...