"Ships of unknown origin landing at key installations!"
You can gain extra lives by flattening enemy control centers (groups of ground targets) and sometimes you will be given the chance to attack a number of ground installations to find a hidden power up, either an extra life or a shield. You also gain bonus points by destroying complete waves of enemies.
It all sounds nice and fun, doesn't it? Until you actually start playing. The gameplay is maddeningly difficult right from the start. Mostly so because your Lightforce fighter is two sprites wide with its big wings which leaves very little room to manoeuvre, not to mention trying to dodge a group of fast enemies and their auto targeting shots. Many enemies require several hits before they go down, and the ground installations do as well. Often the ground is saturated with buildings that soak all your shots and allow the enemy fighters to come up so close you have a hard time destroying them.
The graphics are functional but uninspiring and fail to provide any memorable settings. Enemies are mostly blocky animated balls or rotating cubes in single colour schemes. The backgrounds are a little bit better with some animated features like rotating radar dishes and destroyed bridge sections plummeting into water but are otherwise just as ugly. Actually the best feature of the whole game is the Lightforce theme by none other than Rob Hubbard which is superb.
As it stands, Lightforce is a missed opportunity, if the fun factor was upped a bit it could have been a classic.