Battle Squadron

This game from the Sword of Sodan programmer began with a slow peaceful drift across a coloured star field – in fact, you could be forgiven for thinking it was a Galaxian clone! It soon resolved into an excellent vertically scrolling shoot-em-up in the classic arcade tradition.

Battle Squadron was the sequel to the excellent Hybris, but was a lot less derivative.  Hybris was in essence a clone of the arcade game, Terra Cresta, from Japanese developer Nichibutsu.

Burrowing aliens, Raiden-style power-ups, non-patterned attack waves and loads of bullets gave this one great lastability.  Its main competition on the Amiga was Xenon II: Megablast from the Bitmap Brothers but Battle Squadron was a great deal harder.

It received an excellent conversion to the Megadrive / Genesis, though it lacked the Amiga’s great music.