In an unknown time and place, there's happening few odd volcanic erutions on the surface of a dead planet, and it's becoming intense as time goes by. Suddenly, during an apparent moment of calm, there it is: an impressive explosion, a magma river comes out of the barren planet. Rubbles and lava are scattered around with the quake, reaching unimaginable heights.

At the end of the catastrophe, an impressive and terrifying creature exits the crater: he's the Gidans emperor. Any planet and traveller's nightmare is back, though we wrongly thought he was defeated once and forever during the latest intergalactic war. The Gidans army is quickly restored and its purpose is getting back what they lost.

The war gets short, no human fleet is able to engage the newest war machines. The Gidans empire quickly takes control of the galaxy again. The astroport gets notice of few refugees flying away from a massacre happening on their planet.

Pilot: "HyperFighter One ready. Please begin launch procedures."
Control Room: "HyperFighter One, start up engines..."
Pilot: "All systems go. Please open the gate."
Control Room: "Launch!"
Pilot: "HyerFighter One is out."
Control Room: "Good Luck!"

The new space adventure begins with Truxton II, a vertically scrolling shoot'em up featuring single and two-player cooperative mode. Game is composed of six phases, each full of beautiful Gidans starships and anti-aircraft turrets, and ending with a giant boss.

Your HyperFighter's weaponry is quite scarce at the beginning: two guns shooting forward and three smart bombs. Every time you hit a skull-shaped airship or depot, a pod is released and it has various effects. There are various kinds of items:

- a sort of shield marked "S" makes the HyperFighter faster (five pods for maximum speed);

- a spherical item marked "B" is nothing but an additional smart bomb (it's a very rare finding);

- a square item marked "1up" gives an extra-life;

- starship-shaped items can be red, green and blue and they increase the HyperFighter firepower (five pods to get maximum power). Every time you get a pod of the same type of the one your ship is using, then it's powered; if you get a different one, it simply changes the current weapon without boosting its power. Three colours are available:

- red: small though lethal napalm bombs shot in various directions at short range. Every additional red pod enables more firing directions;

- green: wide-range shoot in the shape of a fan. Every additional green pod makes the range wider;

- blue: laser beam identifying targets automatically. Every additional blue pod makes it more powerful.

Every additional speed or weapon pod after the fifth is worth 5.000 points.

Do you remember Capcom's classics, 1942 and its sequels? Two small airplanes appeared on the sides of the airplane, all shooting at the same time... well Truxton II features a very similar idea: when collecting a coloured pod for the first time, two drones appear of the same colour on the sides of the HyperFighter, each shooting bullets or laser beams of their kind. These drones have various shapes: the red ones look like rolling shields, and the green and blue ones look like small starships.

Truxton II reminds much as its predecessor. There are squadrons of alien ships both coming towards your ship or shooting at it, asteroids belts (beware of larger rocks hiding Gidans starships!), ground bases and robot factories, futuristic tanks, flying fortresses and huge area bosses of many shapes: an impressive variety of fast, colourful and furious monsters. You'd better equip your ship with the proper weapon before engaging battles, especially when getting to further game phases - tackling enemy bullets becomes then extremely hard!

Let's give a look at the on-screen panels. On the top of it, there are current score and highest score (an odd thing: the player two's score states 140.000 when no one's playing).

Under the current score there are miniatures of the HyperFighter, showing how many lives are left. On the bottom part of the screen there are the smart-bombs indicators in the shape of small (non-human?) skulls.

Enemies are tough: they hardly explode with a single shoot and usually require to be hit lots of times - well it also depends on the power of your weapon. As for scoring, each bullet/laser beam/bomb hitting an enemy is worth 10 points, plus an additional score is provided when that enemy is defeated.

There are neither bonus stages between one phase and the next one, nor pauses, no congratulations at all (except when completing all phases). Action never stops.

At the end of the game, if you were such good to make an high score, you'll be asked to enter your name and enter the hall of fame until you turn the game off (or the next hard-disk crash in case you're using an hiscore-dat file heh!). But well, the best part of that is the pleasure of listening to the great hall of fame sound tune.