Walking enemies will constantly zoom towards you from either side with hardly any warning, and almost always take at least two hits to dispatch. Some games could make this work, I suppose, but Ultionus instead decides to be “hard as nails” in the nails-on-chalkboard agonizing way. Your character is slow, she can’t move while shooting, there are huge delays between her shots (which only get worse the longer you try to shoot at once), and she can only aim straight ahead and slightly up and ahead. The issue here is that because it exists as an homage to some ancient game I’ve never heard of, it controls worse than the Castlevania Adventure on the old GameBoy. You shuffle your top-heavy lass through rather open levels, dodging threats with her floaty jump and blasting enemies with her ray gun. Ultionus is primarily a side-scrolling platformer, though there are a few space shoot-em-up levels. We’ll get to the story later, because the gameplay needs to take center stage here. Ultionus definitely suffers from this sort of short-sighted design, and then goes and layers a bunch of other terrible ideas on top of it, like some kind of foul garbage lasagna. Honestly very few of them age well, and those that don’t are usually held back by designs or mechanics that should have remained in a bygone era. It sounds like it should be the opposite, except that classic games are often a product of their time.
Legacy Ī spiritual successor to Phantis featuring a modern take of the characters and setting, titled Ultionus: A Tale of Petty Revenge, was released in 2014.Making an homage to a classic game is often harder than coming up with something new, and I don’t think many people realize that. It received the scores of 69% from Amstrad Action, 55% from Commodore User, 60-63% from The Games Machine, and 62% from Sinclair User. The game was given generally mediocre reviews.
The game's promotion included an appearance of a model dressed up as Queen Gremla at the trade convention PC Show '88.
The Atari ST version was never published in Spain and only exists with the Game Over II title. Other than the graphical change of a female player character to a male player character, the game itself is largely identical in both versions.Īlthough originally released as an independent game under the title Phantis, it was retitled as a sequel to Game Over. After it has been discovered that he has been imprisoned on the jail planet Phantis by the heirs of the empress Gremla, Major Locke is chosen for the rescue mission. The English-language version ( Game Over II) takes place immediately after the events of Game Over, where Arkos, the hero of the rebellion, is nowhere to be found. In the original Spanish version ( Phantis), the player controls Commander Serena on a mission to rescue her expedition partner captured on Moon 4 of the SOTPOK System, better known as the world of Phantis. Some versions of the game were split into two parts due to size restrictions. There are four "phases" with six levels each. Game Over II is a mix between a scrolling shooter (similar to R-Type) and a platform game (similar to Turrican).