Star Defender II

The Good
Diving into the game puts you into an arcade-ready experience. You’ve got immersive detailed scenes in each stage, cool explosion effects, rendered stationary and flying enemies, thrilling and moody music tracks, smooth movement with the mouse, and quick thinking to grab as many points in each level as you can.

The waves of enemies you face are new insect-like alien vessels instead of the typical spaceships found in many space-themed shooters. The variety increases with each stage you proceed to. Fighting those enemies is a thrilling, the difficulty balanced by the use of concussion and homing missiles, plus it’s satisfying to level up the main gun, from shots to blasts to lasers. There’s also aiding power-ups for easy goings,

The Bad
Balanced as the game is, the challenge of the game is as fair as your skill at not getting hit. If you get downgraded to and stuck wi5 a single shot on your main gun, you’re not getting a high score as big as you want. Sometimes the upgrades to your main gun sacrifice both spread and speed of fire for pure power level, making the ability to wipe out waves of enemies too cumbersome. To add to the challenge, it is unfortunate that you cannot select what missile you want on a whim, you just have to wait to collect one kind of missile, or use up the currently selected in order to switch to the other kind. Whether you want to call these restrictions good or bad are up to you.

The Bottom Line
This title is a significant improvement over its prequel. Like any good old Galaxian shooter, this one is no exception when it comes to re-imagining the genre in a unique way. For its time, this game brought something simple and solid to PC players. Not great that Mac and Linux players got left out of the game. This is definitely an overlooked title worth going back to and bringing back on any virtual platform for old hardcore arcade-styled gaming.