Written by John Gibson and published by Imagine Software in 1983, Zzoom is a simple first-person shoot ’em up where the aim is to protect refugees from attacking enemy forces.

The refugees walk along the ground (or float on boats in the water levels), and the enemy forces attack from the air, and later the land and sea as well.

You’re inside an aircraft that can move left, right, up and down (it doesn’t move forward – at least not in the first stage) and you fire into the screen, aiming with a set of crosshairs. Rather frustratingly you are limited by how far left, right, up and down you can move. If you reach the limits of the (rather small) view area you just stop moving. If you move too far downwards you’ll crash into the ground, so you have to be careful with that.

Zzoom‘s Wikipedia page (at the time of writing) describes the game as “a combat flight simulator” which is completely inaccurate – it’s as much a “combat flight simulator” as Manic Miner is a “mining simulator”… It’s just a basic shoot ’em up. There is absolutely no “simulator” about it.

The game has three distinct stages that change every couple of attack waves. In the first stage you’re ‘flying’ over an airfield runway with a grassy horizon. Enemy aircraft drop bombs at the refugees and fire spinning ‘bullets’ at you. You can shoot the spinning bullets coming toward you (if you’re quick enough), but you can’t shoot the bombs dropping on the refugees.

In the second stage the scene cuts to a desert, with the occasional palm tree zooming past. Tanks move toward you and they can be destroyed by either shooting at them in the crosshairs or by firing missiles at them. If the tanks hit any refugees they’ll be killed.

In the third stage you’re located over water and the refugees are in small boats. Submarines surface occasionally to shoot at you and sink the poor refugees who get in their way. You can’t shoot the subs in the crosshairs (otherwise you’ll crash into the sea), but you can fire missiles at them.

Subsequent stages are variations of the above, but with aircraft attacking you as well as land and sea forces. Although you’re unlikely to get that far without cheating…

You start off with three lives and have limited shields. Each hit you take erodes your shields and I don’t think there’s a way of replenishing them. You do, however, get an extra life every 50,000 points.

I remember playing Zzoom for hours when I was a young lad with a humble Speccy, but was never particularly impressed with it. Looking at it now, I’d say that it was relatively advanced for a Spectrum game in 1983 (which were mostly pretty poor back then because the home computer games market was embryonic), but playing it now doesn’t bring much joy (nostalgic or otherwise). There’s some pretty bad attribute clash on display, and graphically, sonically, and gameplay-wise, it’s very basic.

Zzoom hasn’t stood the test of time particularly well and will probably only appeal to those looking for a bit of nostalgia. There’s little substance to the game but it’s an okay diversion for a short while.

More: Zzoom on Wikipedia
More: Zzoom on World of Spectrum