Control your Solvalou ship and destroy the Xevious forces!

Following the success with Pac-Man and Galaga in the arcades it seemed that Namco were unstoppable. Xevious was first one of the first vertical scrolling shooters we can think of, certainly an innovation for the time.

The action in Xevious takes place on two parallel plains; your spacecraft gets attacked from the ground in addition to aerial assaults. You can attack in straight ahead of you as is the norm in this type of game, more interesting you can also drop bombs using a fixed target ahead of your ship on ground-based enemies.

There are a number of secrets throughout the game such as extra ships and bonus points which keep things interesting, but by today’s standards the gameplay is very limited when compared to other shooters on the NES such as Zanac (which we really hope makes its way to the Virtual Console eventually). The simultaneous bombing and shooting element is a nice touch, but it doesn’t really add that much to the gameplay in reality.

Occasionally, a large mothership will appear, you can try to shoot it down or wait until it leaves. If you get hit by a single bullet, you'll lose a ship and start from a predetermined point. There are no power-ups to collect. The game simply loops the same 10 brief areas indefinitely until you run out of ships. While it's not a bad design, you don't see anything new after the first 30 seconds or so. As such, the game becomes tiresome pretty quickly.

The graphics and audio in the NES conversion are rather basic predictably. The brown and green backgrounds look vaguely like terrain, while the grey enemy ships more closely resemble geometric shapes than aircraft. Throughout it all, you'll hear the same sirenlike music and blipping laser fire sound constantly which may eventually drive you insane if you play this for too long.

With shmup competition from the likes of Gradius, R-Type and Super Star Soldier already on the Virtual Console it is hard to recommend this ancient arcade classic. It’s far from being a bad game, but it has dated quite badly. We recommend you spend your points elsewhere unless you happen to be a nostalgic fan.