Rescue the hostages!
If you imagine QAD to be a fancy 3D version of Defender mixed in with a bit of Battlezone and don't expect too much in the way of complexity, then you should have a pretty good time here. It's far from the deepest or most stimulating of games but for a good bit of blasting fun, it just about delivers the goods. The basic set up is pretty much the same as Defender, with the player charged by the galactic government to head out to a hostile planet and rescue all the captured hostages which are imprisoned on its surface. There are other bounty hunters with the same mission though, so you're going to have to fight hard to get the hostages, and hence the reward, first. You have access to a dinky little flying vehicle and a land-based one for re-arming, and basically the gameplay requires you to fly around, grabbing hostages and of course blowing merry hell out of both the other mercenaries and the many aliens which are trying to stop you. You're restricted to low level flight only, so there's no breaking into the atmosphere but the bad guys on the planet are probably enough to keep you busy anyway. QAD is certainly not a complicated game nor is it going to keep you going for weeks on end. However, sometimes you just want to blow stuff up and if that's the case, this is just what you want. The controls are easy to pick up and the flying is fast and furious, with a lot of action to keep you busy. It does get a little repetitive after a while, but the mix of shooting and hostage rescue is fun in short bursts, so pick it up if that's all you need.
