Genre: Shooter
Developer: Kuju
Publisher: Nokia

Taking a cue from the classic shooter "Xevious", Space Impact is a scrolling overhead shooter that features vessels approaching you through air and ground. The character and enemy sprites are shaded and well drawn, though the detail put into the representation of the ground beneath your ship distrinctly lacks pizazz and looks fairly dithered. In fact, the game's visuals in general lack the pizazz of some of the better overhead shooters, such as Infinite Dreams' "Sky Force".

Perhaps in an attempt to keep the game's size down, Space Impact features no music aside from a catchy little ditty that plays at the title screen. Sound effects are limited to a generic, lazer-esque shooting sound effect, and a "getting hit" sound effect, with the "getting hit" applying to you or an enemy. These few effects are digital I imagine, but could have probably been closely replicated even on the NeoGeo Pocket Color's limited sound hardware.

Space Impact follows the most bare-bones, early examples from this genre. You can move in eight directions, shoot, and occasionally fire off a special attack, which is granted for a few seconds via a powerup. The trouble is that one hit equals the loss of a life, an antiquated attribute of a shooter. Second, powerups are much too scarce, and the levels all play exactly like the one before it. This title does not play horribly, but rather is just a tad boring.

Considering that Space Impact is available for free on the CD that ships with Nokia's N-Gage, this is not at all a bad title to install on your Symbian phone as just something else to play for a short while. When it comes to actual entertainment value though, Space Impact is lacking through and through; Galaga, Xevious, and dozens of other classic shooters are more entertaining and can be played on Symbian using emulation.