Metro Blitz

The Good
Metro Blitz is yet another simple game that was released after the Commodore 64’s infancy, and in my opinion, it is excellent. Like other games released around the same year, it takes a long time to load, so you have to have a lot of patience while the game is loading. The instructions on what you have to do are explained on the title screen, and you can select which wave you want to start off at.

Your job is to defend the metropolis at the bottom of the screen from kamikaze attacks by flying saucers, until the purple line above the scores disappears. Once it does, you proceed to the next wave where the same flying saucers have new attack patterns that must be memorized. In wave three, for instance, some of them will appear from the side, go over the top of a skyscraper, and slam into its side. You have ten lives; lose all of them or let the city be destroyed, and the game is over. The real trick to this game is trying to avoid smashing into flying saucers or touching the screen boundaries.

Waiting for that purple line to disappear is agony, given that more and more enemies appear every five seconds. It makes it more likely that you will miss one that actually takes a big chunk out of your city. To help you with this, your ship is equipped with rapid fire. Never let go of the fire button and you will be doing more damage.

The metropolis itself is detailed and quite colorful, as are the flying saucers that appear. I always enjoy watching how your spaceship respawns; when you are hit, you explode nicely, then you get to watch the same explosion but in reverse. What I also found neat is the way you can actually see the enemies appear through the scores. There are actually stars in the background, giving the impression that the game is set in space. The sound effects are your standard shooting sounds; they are on par with classic arcade games from the Seventies and Eighties.

The game is also addictive. I ended up getting to about wave ten and still kept the city intact. The game can be used to “score attack”, in which you try to beat your previous score every time you play the game. There is no high score table, so one must be written down on paper.

The Bad
There isn’t anything bad about this game.

The Bottom Line
In Metro Blitz, your job is to protect a city from being destroyed by flying saucers without crashing into them or touching any edge of the screen. Once you have spent enough time doing this, you proceed to the next wave. The gameplay is frenetic, and the graphics and sound are excellent. If you are a fan of addictive shoot-'em-ups, then the game deserves to be in your C-64 library.