Revista: THE AMIGA INFORMER (EEUU). Nro.17, Ene./Feb.1999.
Reportaje: Gunbee F-99.
Autor del reportaje: Jeremy Campbell.

Gunbee F-99 is a new overhead shoot-em-up from German publisher APC&TCP and Peruvian programmer Lobsang Alvites. Gunbee has a japanese comic book style theme and intro. The intro is unique and entertaining. Your Gunbee ship is equipped with a machine gun, bombs, and a high powered firebeam. The objective is to pilot your ship through the levels and destroy waves of enemy ships for points, avoid enemy ground and air fire, collect power-ups and bonuses, and finally eliminate the end of level monster.

Gunbee is challenging, has very addictive gameplay, and good sound effects. Because of the look of this game, it seems to me that it would greatly appeal to young childrens. Unfortunately beacuse of the rather high difficulty level I feel most kids would lose interest in it very quickly. However, because of the childish look of the game most adults might not be interested in playing it either. It does have have two modes of play but both are pretty tough. Compared to other AGA overehead shoot-em-ups that have been released recently (such as Ultra Violent Worlds) Gunbee's graphics appeared dated. The game has no save option nor does it give any level codes, so when you quit it's impossible to start where you left off.

My major problem with this game is the fact that running anything else before running Gunbee caused a software failure either upon execution or upon quitting. When the software failed upon quitting it invalidated my hard drive, causing the OS to do time consuming repairs. As long as I ran nothing but Gunbee after bootup it seemed to work fine. I don't know about you, but I seldom boot my Amiga only to run one specific game, so this is a serious problem in my opinion.

Even though I liked portions of Gunbee, I regretfully can't recommend it (unless you're just desperate for a new shoot-em-up) becasue of the softwre failures. If not for the failures, the game itself would rate a C+, but overall the highest rating I can give Gunbee is a D. I would like to mention that the author he was very receptive and helpful with my concerns. Gunbee F99 comens on two floppies, includes a hard drive installer, and has adequate documentation. It needs AGA, a hard drive, and 4 Mb FastRam. Tested on an A1200, 68060, 50 Mb ram. Check with your favorite Amiga retailer for availability and pricing or visit APC&TCP homepage for further details.

RATING:

Gameplay: C+
Overall: D