Lunar Jetman is a shooter video game developed and published by Ultimate Play The Game. It was released for the ZX Spectrum in 1983 and the BBC Micro in 1984.[1] The game is the second instalment of the Jetman series and one of the few games released to support the Currah Microspeech peripheral. In the game, Jetman has to destroy alien bases whilst simultaneously defending himself, along with Earth, from a hostile alien race. Lunar Jetman was Ultimate Play The Game's first game to require 48K of RAM - all previous games had run on unexpanded 16K models. The game was written by Chris Stamper with graphics designed by Tim Stamper. The game was followed by a third instalment, Solar Jetman: Hunt for the Golden Warpship, released for the NES in 1990. The game was met with critical acclaim upon release, with praise mostly directed at its addictive gameplay and wide range of colours. It was later included in Rare's 2015 Xbox One retrospective compilation, Rare Replay.


Also in series

Jetpac Refuelled
Jetpac Refuelled
Solar Jetman: Hunt for the Golden Warpship
Solar Jetman: Hunt for the Golden Warpship
Jetpac
Jetpac

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A mess of a game with nonsensical visuals. The addition of the vehicle really doesn't do anything to improve the gameplay.

The sequel to Jetpac is needlessly complex, to the point where without reading a manual or looking it up, knowing what to do is impossible. Reading the manual was a lot more expected back in the day, but your game should be intuitive no matter what era it was made unless it was something that really needed an accompanying manual like a text adventure.

You can fly and shoot like before, but it's no use. You have to use the bomb to destroy Alien Bases, but to do that, you have to get your truck over there. To get your truck over there, you have to get out of your truck and build bridges so it can drive over craters. Good luck though as the enemies are ruthless, fast, and unpredictable, meaning lots of cheap deaths are awaiting you.

This was just sad and dull, but not every studio gets off the ground running right away. Sometimes your bump is a super tiny crater you just gotta build a bridge over while being swarmed from all sides, and sometimes it's just Lunar Jetman.

The sequel to Jetpac. It adds a lot more mechanics to it and is all the worse for it. The main flying and shooting is the same as Jetpac and still feels great, but then you notice that your fuel goes down quickly and there’s a time limit, as well as arrows pointing towards your truck and an alien base, and a bomb nearby your truck.

After failing to understand what you’re supposed to do, I ended up checking the digital manual. The goal of the game is to blow up enemy turrets (the “alien base” arrow points towards these). To do this, you have to pick up a bomb and fly it to the base and let go from a good enough altitude for it to blow.

However, your limited fuel is a big problem – you don’t have enough to fly to your enemy base. This is where your truck comes in, you can place the bomb on it and drive towards the base. You are also invincible while in the truck. Along the way will be lots of craters, which your truck can’t drive over. You’ll need to exit the truck, pick up a platform (by pressing “pick up” on your truck) and drop it over the gap. You can also grab a turret for your gun, but as you need to take the bomb, this is only useful to blast some enemies for points for a bit before moving on. There’s also a teleporter, which mainly just gets in the way.

There are loads of different types of enemies that bombard you. They all chase you in different ways, either that move past the screen or some that stalk you to attack when you leave the truck, or chase you in other ways.

The complexity of Lunar Jetman makes the game far less fun than Jetpac, and is not something I’d want to play again.

My “completion” of Lunar Jetman was to reach level 10 (the point suggested by the milestones), plus all Snapshots – which I thought were a lot more fun to play than the main game.

Exceptionally bad even relative to other games from this era.

Yeah, not gonna lie, I didn't really like this one as much as Jetpac. Sure, I can see the appeal with the game, but the sporadic enemies and the limited jetpack fuel makes the game more annoying for me then fun. Or maybe I just have a massive skill issue. That's probably it.

Game #90