Interstellar Flames 2 is a thrilling, full-speed action game where you have to be on your toes and fast with the trigger to save planet Earth from being conquered by not-so-very-friendly aliens. The rules are easy: shoot first. The problem is: you're alone.

A vast horde of alien battleships is approaching our solar system. Due to maintenance problems only one fighter craft is ready to defend the planet. Fly dangerous missions against huge battle-cruisers, dogfight with enemy fighters in asteroid fields and destroy the alien fleet before it enslaves Earth. Can you face them alone?
Certainly from the early build of the game I played back in April, it needed a lot of work doing to it, graphics wise its come on, but the worrying thing is how well will it play? Those who have played Microcosm or Starfox will know as it runs on 'rails' meaning no freedom of movement unless it's been dramatically changed in the last few months I'm certainly not expecting great things, but read on!

The game features  a small rendered Intro of space ships flying towards the screen when you first load the game and before the title screen fades in. The options menu screens are sharp and easy to read, with options of high score viewing, controls, layout, difficulty, sound, display, credits and language.

Loading is very fast with the levels only taking a couple of seconds to load up, while the first thing you notice is the backdrops on each level, certainly nothing to make your eyes pop out here, luckily the main 3D objects are better, the main craft you control is nicely detailed as are the enemy spaceships, all fully texture mapped and well lit, the larger ships that you fly over and around do suffer from low resolution textures and on occasion you will see through when flown up against, a feature many will recall from the PS1 days.

The on-screen display caters for your health bar on the top right while the amount of missiles / bombs is on the bottom right, finally your score is displayed in the bottom left.

Other than the craft the game has lots going on screen at once and does well not to slow down, nice touches like lens flares, particle effects and great explosions all add to the experience, it's a shame as a budget title it has all the music and graphics in place to lead to a great little SEU game.

The option screens carry a 80's style Amiga mod track that's quite catchy in a SEU kind of way, loading up the game greats you with some nice sampled speech from a hot lady (well I Imagine she Is of course!) telling you your systems are 'online' and something about friendly craft being detected, though I can't recall any of them being 'friendly' to me! Other calls from this helpful lady are of your shields being low, she never mentions your doing great with full shields, some people just look at the negative points!

The SFX are typical SEU noises, all the usual blasts and fart noises are present, though special mention to some very nice explosion effects which give a nice satisfying feeling when shooting them down. Overall a pretty impressive package for a budget release.

Controls can be defined in the options but tbh the default ones are easy enough, the two shoulder buttons strafe your ship from left to right, RW and FF are missile and smart-bomb respectively, PLAY is laser fire and finally holding STOP while moving up or down either speeds up or slows down your ship and moving left or right makes the craft barrel roll quickly out of danger.

You might think that sounds quite a few buttons and combinations to remember, but at the end of the day its not amount of buttons but the stiffness of the movement that lets the game down, moving the hud cursor takes long than it should, and in a fast paced shooting game that's the last thing you need, while other times it feels like your ship is flying itself while you struggle to get out of a difficult corner!

• Budget Price!
• Functional Graphics

Even with the budget price of £10 this title is another example of 3D shooting games not working as well as 2D ones do, even the best 3D ones use a 2D perspective, it's not to say IF2 is terribly bad, it's not, the price reflects this as a budget title so the final score wouldn't be as low if it were a £30 title, it's a fun for a short while but before long the repetitive nature of the game along with the low replay factor will leave you wanting a more matured blaster, try P.O.D or even Angelfish in the Fathammer Classics pack for your SEU fix.

• Steep Learning Angle.
• Becomes annoying/repetative quickly.