Lucifer's Kingdom

The Good
Scrolling vertical shoot em up games are not actually that common on the Dragon/Co-Co family platform, with pretty good reason. They are not the easiest to produce at the bets of times, and very easy to get wrong. This one nails it, despite the game being produced relatively late in the machine's life when games had very much evolved beyond shoot-em-ups. The collision detection is fantastic- a key point for such games- when I hit something I want it to be hit, and nobody likes to die with clear pixels between your ship and whatever object you have been careless enough to fly near. Graphically it is monochrome PMODE 4, and I must confess I have never even played it with artifact colors on my NTSC Dragon by Tano. It works perfectly in monochrome. The game itself has a little bit of complexity in the task beyond scrolling up and shooting bad guys, the crystal collection being an amusing diversion.

The Bad
The quality of the sound matches the quality of the front cover- a hastily assembled homebrew cover with a cheeky devil on. Dragon games by now often had an impressive pseudo multi-channel sound effect, despite the machines' limitations, so it is odd to find such a polished game with sound closer to something from 1984.

The Bottom Line
A smooth vertical scrolling shoot em up, as good as the Dragon got.