A.D. 2097

At last, human can't control repeated invasions to the Earth.
As a last resort, the United Nations commissioned the strongest cyborg soldier to the legendary space death squad.

2097 is quite a popular year in videogames history... is there some peculiar reason why the sequel to Wipeout took place in the same year too? Well, while people on Earth enjoyed running fool speed races onboard of ultrasonic spacecrafts, many other dangerous problems affected a faraway sector of the galaxy... a place which we humans use to call the "out zone".

Two years before, in 2095, terrestrians had to resist the invasion of bloody aliens coming from planet Waogira. In those days, United Nations received a secret message mentioning the existance of an army of cyborg soldiers, incredibly skilled and powered, capable of stopping the alien invasion - just asking for nothing but a handful of money coins and papers as a reward.

After being dropped to the hostile alien planet, the best two mercenaries of that squadron (wearing blue and red space suits, and proudly showing their long blond hair in pure Tarzan style!) immediately find themselves in the middle of the battle. Maybe alien defence forces were alerted because of their landing on the planet's jungle, who knows!

Our mission begins here. Wearing the role of the two heroes, we'll cross enormous locations which compose seven game levels. All levels differ one each other both because of graphics style and required battling strategy. We'll fight small robot troops, assault crafts fleets, enormous space flies hives... but we'll also see mechanical labyrinths with killer doors, traps on the floor, scary cryogenic rooms, magma seas and bridges crossing deep space... This all is just a prelude to the final battle against the planet's king creature.

Game style is the one of classic vertically scrolling shoot'em ups - a sort of sequel to Commando. Actually Out Zone is deeply inspired to Capcom's masterpiece: in both games player has to "push" screen in order to make it scroll ahead - this means you won't be forced to go forward automatically. But well... so can we stand there and blast enemies forever without taking care of the passing of time? Not at all of course! Our survival suits have a limited amount of energy, which decreases automatically as time passes by, and so we're forced to go ahead quickly in seek of new energy sources ...and so a little introduction to power-ups is necessary: they're the real core of this videogame!

While we move around game areas, we'll often find white metallic boxes having a red light on: we have to destroy them in order to collect their content, that is energy charges for use with our survival suits.

Our waponry consists of two standard configurations for laser gun. The first one is a moveable pointer which gets the same direction as our body, that's really useful against enemy attacking from all directions around us, but totally unuseful when we hunt for big enemies standing in front of us - and area bosses of course! The second is a three-way weapon which always points forward and shoots in three directions simultaneously: its employment is complementary to the other weapon.

Both weapons can be powered twice by collecting blinking "P"s, which appear when we destroy enemies coloured in red. When our fire power reaches the maximum, red enemies will start leaving special weapons such as Super Ball and Super Burner (both really powerful!), shields, extra energy and speed.

Each time we're hit, we'll lose both a life and all power-ups. If a two-player simultanously game is in progress, a new cyborg replaces the killed one. In single-player games action is interrupted and it restarts a few feets behind.

Red enemies might eventually leave blinking "B"s, which are nothing but "smart-bombs". We can collect them and use at our will: they'll blast every enemy away or, at least, damage them. We can collect up to ten bombs, then each additional bomb just provides us with a 5000 points bonus.

So, there's a great choice for weaponry and power-ups. And if you think it's not enough for you, why not also collecting hidden bonuses (many of which are realy hard to find)? Would you like the support of a fleet of starships coming directly from the Truxton videogame - another wonderful Toaplan game? Or do you prefer a squadron of Flying Shark airplanes attacking your enemies from above? And did you ever dream blowing Pipi away, main character of the Pipi & Bibi's game? Now you can do this... you just have to find where he's hidden!

Either case, everything is part of the battle, and action is always adrenalinic. Enemis everywhere, each following preordered attacking schemes - though sometimes leaving place to a primitive artificial intelligence.

And if you'll find yourself crossing a "calm" area, pay attention to the screen borders, because new foes might suddenly attack you from any direction (they often come from your back!). Variety of enemies is really interesting and it shifts from the usual troops of soldiers to land turrets armed with cannons, laser-powered hovercrafts, huge mechanical worms, moving walls with plasma guns...

At the end of each level we'll fight an area boss. We'll first battle four red trucks in formation, then multi-cellar organic creatures defended by steel-cutting lasers, mechanical fireflies, armored starships shooting boomerang missiles... the final battle is gonna be darn exciting!

Labyrinths are really interesting too: those are alien army basements where enemies move within walls - each containg launch corridors and sliding doors which usually open when your character is passing by, ouch!

Speaking of the technical features of the videogame, I can't avoid mentioning the clean graphics style, which is a sort of standard to most Toaplan products. Looks like graphicians come from the same staff as Truxton, and in fact the two videogames share very similar hardwares. Many touches of class all over the game: enemy trucks rubbers leave prints on the planet's floor; earthly turrets and trucks explosions leave enormous craters and flaming thrash; everything on screen repeatedly reminds you of your adversaries' incredible power!

Game soundtrack was composed by Tatsuya Uemura, who reveals himself as being a skilled musician, capable of creating a perfect mood for this experience: impacting sound tunes match what we would have awaited from this videogame. At that time (1990, the middle of the first high-quality vertically scrolling shoot'em up games era) the promotion of the videogame even gave manufacturers the idea of releasing the soundtrack CD! And of course they made it really attractive and hooking: they added another Toaplan's classic soundtrack: Snow Bros'!

Manufacturers themselves are really proud of the results, and they mention Out Zone as one of their most convincing, innovative and well-designed videogames ever. I also name the wonderful sequel Fix Eight, which emulation with RAINE is unfortunately still quite preliminary.