Frenetic is a vertical shooter created by Core Design and released for Amiga and Atari ST in 1991.
It's a traditional game that perfectly fits the space shoot-em-up genre, including masterpieces such as Xenon 2: Megablast and Hybris. Frenetic is divided into eight vast levels that alternate between technological and alien-organic design. Of course, there are plenty of enemies, power-ups, weapons, and end-of-level bosses. In this, the game does not try to innovate too much.
The most discussed decision is the reset of all weapons and power-ups when you lose a life, something very frustrating for the players. Anyway, Frenetic has a feature you don't find in many other games: this shoot-em-up by Core Design can be played by two players simultaneously in co-op. If you are with a friend, you are lucky! Have fun!
I always enjoyed Core Design's games, and still remember seeing the gorgeous looking screenshots of Frenetic in CU Amiga magazine. I bought the game from Just Micro in Sheffield, without actually having played it. I enjoyed it at the time, but it had little allure to draw you back on a regular basis.
Fast-forward almost thirty years, and how does it hold up? The first thing that grabbed me was the music. It really has a great soundtrack; certainly way above Core's usual standard in sound design. It's beautifully drawn – it looks distinctly Core Design (Chuck Rock, Torvak the Warrior, Jaguar XJ220) and still looks good today, but therein also lies its downfall. The backgrounds are so busy and vibrant, it's very easy to miss enemy bullets or sprites – there's simply too much going on, and with no sense of depth or perspective, your puny ship explodes in no time at all. So the first gripe is the old die-in-one-hit; secondly you lose all your weaponry, which is really frustrating if you've managed to build up a good armoury. The weapons are good and you can get a pretty powerful ship, but you can lose it all in an instant with no or little chance of building it back up again. An energy bar and super-charge weapon would have made a big difference to the playability. In contrast, I always liked the fact you could collide with the background without dying. The only danger the background walls pose are the potential to get trapped in them as they scroll off screen.
The graphics are vibrant, though slightly cartoony with that distinctive Core design chequerboard shading and thick black outlines (apart from on your ship, which also lacks dynamism). The game borrows heavily from Xenon II and Hybris/Battle Squadron and sadly isn't a patch on either. Without a shooter under their belts up until the release of Frenetic, it does feel a little like Core were having fun paying tribute to previous blasters.
While they're reasonably generous with the number of lives, there's no credits; you're straight to game over. I still like Frenetic, though it is just as frustrating as I remembered – with the varying level speed being the only thing remotely different about Frenetic, it does beg the question as to what they were aiming for.
Review by: GN Team
Review by: theLightDreams
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