Vitals:
Year – 1985
Developer – Konami
Genre – Run and gun
Life – 1 hit
Lives – 5
Modes – Solo, 2P Co-Op
I decided to slip out of my comfort zone and start playing some games that I had heard of, but might not have played (or don’t remember playing). So all I really know about this game is that you’re one guy with a death wish breaking in to the bad guy’s base (which are the soviets I think) to kill everyone/everything. Sounds like fun.
As usual I just got right in to the game without further preparation. Usually I kind of knew what was going on, this game wasn’t really that hard to pick up. I was kind of confused starting with a knife considering the genre is ‘Run and Gun’ but I’m not going to complain. I started stabbing guys left and right – who apparently are just happy to run up to a guy air stabbing until they get close enough to get popped.
I went up ladders, and down ladders, ran around a bit – killed a bunch of guys. Then something occurred to me. All these guys are carrying guns. But they aren’t shooting at me; they just run up and try to bash in to me. Maybe the Soviets were too cheap to buy ammunition for the weapons? “Hey Boss, we can buy guns for everyone, or guns and ammo for half of them, what do you think?”
Not far in to the level I came across these flashing things on the ground. Immediately I’m thinking ‘touch activated mines!’ I’m not sure how to jump though – I’d pressed both buttons and neither of them is jump. The bad guys were just running over them – so I figured maybe they were decorations. Run run run – BANG. Nope, touch activated mines. Teach me not to go with my gut.
It took me a while to get far enough to run in to the guys that try to dropkick me instead of just running in to me. That was new, it also took me a bunch of tries to figure out how to kill them. They can do this superman-like bouncing dropkick thing that sure makes it difficult to poke them. I also ran in to some guys who lay on the ground, so I figured out that I can also lie on the ground and poke stuff. How awesome is that! My wife was laughing her head off at my running commentary. “Oh crap I jumped on that guy’s head, this isn’t Mario. Ah, bouncing dropkick guy is after me! Hey, I can lie on the ground and poke people - that’s cool. This guy has a gun – well it isn’t really a gun it’s like a bazooka or something – that doesn’t seem fair” (at which point she said that me having a knife and them having guns wasn’t fair so this seemed more reasonable.) The bazooka is pretty cool too – it goes through people and doesn’t explode. It also blows up mines on the ground if you lay down to shoot – double bonus.
My progress over the next few days was dismal …
Day 1: Level 2
Day 2: Level 3
Day 3: Level 2
Then I started getting really good at color recognition and I learned a few tricks for how to get past guys and such, so I did really well on day 4 and got to level 4. Then I got stuck on level 2 again. Finally I decided to abuse the save state function of emulators to actually make some progress to write about.
The levels almost seemed to get easier, or maybe I just got better at them – it’s hard to say. But I made it to the end, which actually happened sooner than I thought it would. Of course at that point I was so tired of different coloured bad guys that I was kind of happy it was over.
The Good Stuff:
Getting through the levels was challenging, without being impossible. The ‘bosses’ at the end of each stage were actually quite intuitive, and while they took a bit of practice weren’t all that difficult. Getting to them and surviving was really the challenge.
It wasn’t too complicated, for a straight run and gun game all you really want to do is move forward and kill stuff – this game definitely delivered that.
The lack of weapons kind of annoyed me at first until I discovered that you have to poke certain guys for weapons to pop out. From then on it became a matter of finding those guys and using the weapons properly. (I actually learned this from watching the intro movie thing at the start of the game).
The Ugly Stuff:
Not being able to save progress and continue made this one of the most repetitive and difficult games I’ve played recently. I have discovered that I really rely on being able to keep my forward progress and not have to play the whole game over and over and over again.
The lack of variety and level grinding over and over left me not wanting more, and I kind of ended this review prematurely. I suppose as games have evolved apparently so has my attention span. While it was amusing for a while to poke guys and babble out loud to make my wife laugh it just wasn’t lasting fun.Overall:
Not a game I’d go back for. Having finished it off there really isn’t much left to do. I played through the game so many times that when it finished and started me back at the beginning again (with more lives this time) I was actually disappointed, and felt obligated to kill myself. It didn’t look like the difficulty had altered, but I didn’t really get far the second go around, my heart just wasn’t in it.
Breakdown:
Fun – 5/10
Repetitive play started to wear me down after a few days
Gameplay – 8/10
Mechanics were quite smooth and controls made the game easy to play
Story – 1/10
What story?
Audio – 2/10
Upbeat bleeping, and bad siren sounds
Visual – 5/10
Other than different colors there wasn’t much soldier varation, backgrounds weren’t stunning
Arbitrary coolness – 1/?
Not a keeper
Overall Score – 4.6/10
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