Shoot'em up games have never been in short supply during the third and fourth generation of game consoles. Whether it was World War 2, modern jet fighting, or something futuristic, the genre was as inescapable as it was saturated. While one could bemoan how many of these games were uninspired, I'd rather spend my time talking about the worthwhile gems that came from this. Gems like Rareware's Captain Skyhawk.
In this game you take on the role of a heroic pilot, tasked with repelling an alien invasion. The F-14VTS is a high-tech fighter jet capable of wielding an arsenal of incredible weapons. You'll be piloting this bad boy through 9 intense missions, culminating in a final battle with the alien spaceship.
Control-wise, Captain Skyhawk is very interesting. The game is played from a top-down isometric perspective with a sort-of 3D effect to it. The landscape below is uneven, with hills and mountains and other obstructions forming barriers. You can rise and dip lower to dodge around these. Of course you can also tilt to the sides, all of which is nicely animated for an NES game.
The F-14VTS has a cannon with infinite ammo, but also an assortment of specialized weapons available. These require special inputs like pressing B, holding down on the control pad, and then releasing both. These special weapons are finite, however. You get awarded credits based on your performance that you can then spend at the shop to resupply these weapons.
It plays really well and I had a lot of fun blasting my way through alien hordes. The action is satisfying, yet takes a sufficient amount of skill. Moving too erratically can mean crashing into the mountains by accident and any 1 hit from an enemy will also down your jet instantly. You only get so many lives before you need to continue and those lives sure went by fast on my first few tries. With some practice and upgrades, though, it became a powerful feeling to dodge around these environments, exploding invaders by the dozens.
It's a shame the game never made much of a splash because I feel there was room to do more with these systems. As it stands, for example, you never have any reason to lower your altitude. Low on the ground you risk crashing into obstacles, but there are no dangers high up in the sky. You never have to dip to enter into a tunnel, for example. Altitude also doesn't matter for actually hitting enemies, so I just stayed as high as possible at all times. The special weapons, while fancy, also see little use. Enemies go down in 1 hit and, again, you can hit them no matter how high you fly. In the time it'd take to line up a bombing run I could have just shoot them normally. I put all my money into upgrading the cannon instead and then had nothing to spend credits on for the rest of the game.
The missions are really cool. You got your standard shmup ones where you fight through a level and fight a boss at the end, but also a few special ones. Like a stage that loops where you need to drop supplies at a designated spot. You also have some missions where your take-off is incredibly fucking fast. It is so hard to control and, if you lose a life, you respawn at normal speed. It's a nice layer of extra challenge to try and maintain that speed all the way to the end, though. After every level, you then have a bonus stage. The camera is now behind your aircraft and you have to shoot down enemy jets while dodging their missiles.
While this variety is nice, the game has to really stretch itself. Levels very obviously recycle entire portions, including enemy formations. Even at high-speeds, I was constantly noticing that I had flown through identical areas before with enemies in the exact same places. There are lots of different foes with different animations, but on a functional level they all do basically the same thing and die in 1 hit. Only few enemies have some special gimmick to them. Bosses are similarly recycled and quite simplistic to boot. Though the final battle is suitably thrilling.
These are just shortcuts, however. The reuse of content was obvious and a bit of bummer, but not so much that it ruined the game for me. Not even close. Captain Skyhawk is a fast-paced, satisfying shoot'em up with fantastic visuals and some innovative ideas. Those ideas may have some potential that is left untapped, but the end result is still far ahead of most competitors.
No comments:
Post a Comment