Supreme Airfighter

Personally, I can never get enough scrolling vertical shoot-'em-ups. Even though it's a very limited genre that piqued in 1985, put me in a slow moving plane or spaceship and pit me single-handed against an armada of well-coordinated enemies and I'm happy.

If you feel the same, read on. If not, skip to the end.

Okay, so Supreme Airfighter doesn't offer much of anything new to this overfull genre (and in a few months' time we'll likely have forgotten its name) but it takes its position in the shmup pile seriously and delivers an action-heavy arcade experience with ease.

There's no mucking around with a storyline. Choose your plane, and go to war – that's about it. Supreme Airfighter is pretty much your typical vertical scrolling shooter, with nicely detailed graphics and a good variety of enemies, but it's undeniably a game you've played many times before.

Yet it does have one small tweak that's quite important to its enjoyment. The game uses the popular mobile gameplay mechanic of auto-firing, though with one minor difference: Supreme Airfighter throws a hell of a lot of power-ups your way and, in a rather unique shmup twist, it allows you to keep them all.

The last power-up you collected is used up first, followed by the previous one and so forth until you're back to your standard cannon. Because there are a lot of these massive weapons to collect the ammunition is quite limited, which could pose a problem when it comes to auto-fire wasting your weaponry on an empty screen.

Rather cleverly, then, Supreme Airfighter switches auto-fire on and off automatically (auto-auto-fire?), taking its finger off the trigger when no enemies are present, and unleashing your firepower as soon as they come on screen.

If you're not into vertical scrolling shmups then this small, but vital difference in the game's weaponry won't make you change your thinking, and Supreme Airfighter will therefore harbour little appeal. But shoot-'em-up aficionados will find this gameplay mechanic to be a diamond in the sprawling desert of scrolling shooters.