Villordsutch reviews Vallation on the ZX Spectrum…
Vallation has just arrived on the ZX Spectrum, and is originally a Commodore 64 game created by Jason Kelk aka. Cosine for the RGCD C64 Cartridge Development Competition 2013, this has now been brought over to the Sinclair machine – with love – by Tardis Remakes & Søren Borgquist aka. Sokurah.
It’s also quite obvious that there is another homage going on – when you watch the video below – as Cybernoid from Hewson is clearly worn upon the sleeves of the creators of Vallation. Though granted this is nowhere near as frantic or as punishingly hard as the Hewson classic, it still has some excellent touches of its source material throughout.
The story behind Vallation is that you are trapped within a pirate planet and you must escape through 101 screens (30 more than the C64 version) and across four levels. With missiles, laser beams, enemy ships and shooting enemies (also not present in the C64 version), you have a difficult task ahead of you.
Vallation plays like a fantastic value budget label Cybernoid, it has just the the correct amount of difficulty to make you work for your goal, the map is spread out well and the rockets are there to cause you no end of bother, and the whole game looks excellent and colourful for which I think we need to thank Craig Stevenson aka. Redballoon; along with this we even have some excellent music from Johan Elebrink aka. Brink. The only negatives I can think of is I’d like a bit more variety in my enemies and I’d also like a way to destroy those bloody rockets!
Sokurah, Redballoon and Brink have delivered an excellent game to the ZX Spectrum, and I hope Cosine and Raffaele Cecco are happy with what’s been served up to the ZX Spectrum homebrew community.
You can download Vallation for free here.
Rating: 8/10
Originally published July 9, 2016. Updated June 30, 2023.
