A blast of a shoot-em-up.

User Rating: 8.1 | Crying: Aseimei Sensou GEN
Bio-Hazard Battle is primarily a horizontally scrolling shoot-em-up with just a few areas of vertically and diagonally scrolling action. The story goes that after a biowar on the planet Avaron a virus was released creating all sorts of new and deadly lifeforms rendering the planet uninhabitable. All surviving humans were held in stasis on a space station orbiting Avaron. Skip a few hundred of years and the survivors were awakened by the computer saying that Avaron was now hostile but habitable. It's down to you (and a friend in two-player) to search out the best place to start a colony. Blah blah blah. Now on to the best bits. Shooting baddies!
From the start you realise that it is a very pretty game with nice colours and fluid animation. All the enemies are organic and look and move accordingly. Your fighting craft are also organic and are very lethal weapons. You have four ships to choose from between two slow ones and two faster ones. Additionally each craft shares their secondary (more on that later) weapons with one other craft however they are mixed up to effectively give four unique ships to fly. In simultaneous two-player only one of each ship can be used so you had better hope your friend doesn't pick your favourite. All four of the fighters have the obligatory plasma shot primary weapon which can be tapped for small quick shots or hold the fire button down for an impressively charged plasma wave to obliterate the enemies.
Secondary weapons are fired from a small orbiting satellite around your ship. This satellite follows your movements and with careful control can be placed anywhere around your ship. It can also save you by absorbing enemies fire. The secondary weapons come in four varieties (shown by their colour) and appear as floating orb pick-ups in the game. They can be powered up three times to their maximum strength by picking up like coloured orbs. Beware of picking up an orb of a different colour however as this will change the type of fire and revert it back to it's basic strength. Depending on the ship you can get:
Green - (same for all ships) fires green "implosion pods" which explode upon contact.
Yellow - will either fire a continuous beam of energy or rapid fire projectiles.
Red - will either fire rings of plasma that bounce off scenery or homing laser beams.
Blue - will either fire a multi-directional blast (360 degree coverage) or blue blobs which at close range home in and stick to enemies. Once stuck they then explode.
With eight levels to fly through and several difficulties to choose from this won't be a breeze to sail through especially as the last three levels are only available to the harder difficulty. But you will have fun trying.