Rebelstar Raiders

The Good
Rebelstar Raiders is futuristic turn-based strategy, made by Julian Gollop in 1984 "Orwell's Year". Who is Julian Gollop, some players know - for the rest I will say that this is one of the major game developers. His works were so great titles like UFO: Enemy Unknown, a series of Laser Squad or the "recent" Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars on 3DS. He is Master of turn-based strategy! The game has very solid gameplay mechanisms - if you liked a Laser Squad or UFO battles, you find in RR simplified fun. Each of the three available maps is designed for two players. One of them serves as commander of the invaders, the other is the leader of the defense base. I will say a good word about the maps - these are "realistic" build and require a lot of combinations for players. The commander of the attackers has usually a little more difficult task than the opponent. For example, he has to move his people through the automatic defense cannons. Each unit has its movement points that can be spent on the movement and shooting. Units also have different weapons - grenades, guns and lasers. Pretty good.

The Bad
One big thing - There was no singleplayer mode here! Sorry, there is no possibility of playing against the AI. Why is this option missing - I don't know.Rest of the series has SP. Lack of SP is big minus to RR score. Sorry, you need second person to play, or, at least, have acute schizophrenia. Even "standard ZX Specturm disadvantages", like graphic and music do not interfere, as the absence of SP. Quick summary - graphic is worse than other spectrum TBS, like Rebelstar (second game in series), units are barely visible icons - whole level is on the single screen. Music- just "PC Speaker" level.

The Bottom Line
The game could be a classic - Rebelstar Raiders has a solid advantages (Rules, good maps etc) to make it happen. Unfortunately, "no-single-player-mode" makes the game forgotten by players. This fact explains why the sequel was called Rebelstar, not Rebelstar Raiders II. From me, only 5/10, the other games in the series are MUCH better. Play only when you have the other person.

As a consolation, I will say that at least it is available for free on the World of Spectrum (position the emulator to 48kB, because the game will not go higher). Ave!