Spriggan Mark 2 Re:Terraform Project (PC Engine)

When this game recently got a translation patch, and having playe the SNES Spriggan game, which is a high-quality, but conceptually pretty standards shooting game, I assumed this was one of those cases where a team practices by translating and patching a puzzle or shooting game with little text of little importance. However, it turns out that I was Booboo the Fool in this assumption, because Spriggan Mark 2 is actually an insanely ambitious game to have been released on an eight bit console in 1992.

 

When it comes to console shooting games in 1992, I always think of the PC Engine's Soldier Blade. It's an excellent game, and very impressive for the hardware, but when you compare it to the likes of Advanced Busterhawk Gleylancer and Thunder Force IV being released on the Mega Drive in the same year, it makes NEC's console look like it was being left behind. Spriggan Mark 2 flies in the face of that, being years ahead of its time in design terms, if not technological. It does appear to be an attempt at making an interactive anime in the form of a shooting game.

 

There's a ton of cutscenes, many with that "big pixel art" style that was so popular at the time, especially on PC Engine CD, and even more impressively, there's also a lot of voice acting to go with them! They tell a very Gundam-like story of stolen prototype weapons, colonists on Mars breaking away from Earth's control, and all that kind of thing. It doesn't skimp on the action, though, as while there's a minute or two of dialogue happening between each stage, and sometimes boss fights will also have a little chat-break preceding them, there's still full shooting stages, sometimes with dialogue and Sonic 3 & Knuckles-style visual storytelling happening while they play out, in a pretty seamless manner.

 

The actual shooting is pretty standard for the era: you have a standard machine gun with infinite ammo, and you can also press select to cycle through a bunch of more exciting weapons with limited uses, like homing missiles and a beam saber (you'd think that would be of infinite use, but it does a ton of damage, and I guess the developers sided with balance over logic here). Flying around firing off homing missles while dodging enemy fire and experiencing your comrades playing out their dramas feels great! There's some really amazing moments of ludonarrative cohesion to be found in this game.

 

Another aspect that feels very much ahead of its time is your health bar: it's a lot longer than you would expect from a shooting game of this vintage, and not only that, it slowly regenerates over time! My original theory was that this was because the developers had gone to a lot of effort to tell a story, and they wanted to ensure that the player will easily live to see it through, but to be honest: the game is still pretty difficult. In a few days' play, I've been able to get as far as the third stage. I don't know how many stages there are, but just judging by what's happening, it feels like the story's still in the early parts of playing out. Technologically, there's also what appears to be little moments of sprite scaling and rotation. It could also be a really good job of faking those effects, but either way, it's impressive.

 

Obviously, this is a game worthy of anyone's notice, especially now that it's been translated into English, so the story can be enjoyed by the JP-illiterate. People (rightly) talk a lot about Ginga Fukei Densetsu Sapphire when it comes to impressive PC Engine games, but Spriggan Mark 2 should definitely be in that conversation, too. And it does all the stuff it does without use of the Arcade Card, too! 

Harpoon Shooter Nozomi (Switch)

 Though like any normal person, I prefer my shooting games to strictly follow arcade-style rules: no meta-progression, continues optional (and preferably punished), and scoring being based as much on skill (and as little on either luck or grinding) as possible. I will concede, however, that there is room for games to be experimental, and try different things within the framework of shooting games as a genre. Any such game, even if it's a good game, couldn't be considered a good shooting game. That makes sense, right? You're all on board with what I'm saying, right?

 

Harpoon Shooter Nozomi is such a game as I've just described. It's got a whole bunch of unlocking of weapons, unlocking of stages, various things like that, that mean that even in the "arcade" mode, scoring isn't completely skill-based, since the weapons you unlock in quest mode also get unlocked in arcade, and they tend to be a lot better than the ones available when you first start playing the game. There's also a heavy luck element, with each stage containing a pachinko minigame. You collect balls as you make your way through the stage, then use them in the minigame to secure materials used for unlocking weapons in quest mode, or points in arcade mode.

 

So, it's not a good shooting game. But is it a good game? Yes. There's two big factors that sway my opinion in its favour. The first is that that it's a game that's overflowing with charm. The graphics are all really cute pixel art, drawn with very bright colours and a very endearing, slightly messy style. There's lots of little references to other shooting games like Twinbee and Fantasy Zone. Nozomi makes little comments in the top corner of the screen based on what's currently happening in-game. When you're in the shop, you can see a bunch of little easter egg items from elswhere inthe game on the shelves in the background, and these even change from stage to stage! 

 

The second, more important factor is that this is a game with an overwhelming surplus of ideas, to the extent that I feel like that's worthy of respect on its own. As well as the aforementioned pachinko minigame and weapon shop/development system, I still haven't mentioned the game's eponymous gimmick! You shoot your normal weapon by just holding down the fire button, but when you press it, you shoot out a giant harpoon! There's various things the harpoon can hook onto, the main use being pulling apart larger enemies and bosses: pull the heads off of birds, the shells from snails, the rooves from buildings, and so on. There's some bosses where you have to pull away the boss' armour with your harpoon, then let go, and before it snaps back, shoot the harpoon to pull out the vulnerable cockpit! On top of that, there's a system of Dynamite Headdy-style secret bonuses, including hidden items, as well as secret little tasks, like pulling part of an enemy away from it, then while it's hooked, flying round it in a circle.

 

This is a fun and charming little game, and definitely worth your time, as long as you can disconnect the part of your brain that expects a certain kind of purity from shooting games. I recommend it, with that caveat. I'd also like to know if anyone has any information on the developer, Wandering Wonder. I haven't been able to find anything myself, and I'd like to know what else they've done!

Angelian Trigger (Switch)

 Space Harrier is obviously an excellent game, but since the hard of thinking like to assume that there's no place for sprite scaling in a world with polygons, and that there's no place for rail shooters when free roaming flight sim-style shooters exist, there hasn't been a lot of iteration on its principles over the years, not by SEGA nor by anyone else. But Pixel, who made a name for themselves with Flame Dragon Fist Master Xiaomei, a game in another genre considered dead and obsolete by the ill-informed, the single plane beat em up, took on the task a couple of years ago with Angelian Trigger.

 

Just looking at screenshots, you can see one thing that this game has going for it: it looks amazing. Most of the graphics are made up of high resolution sprites, with those used for the player characters also being lavishly animated. There's some enemies (mainly robotic ones) that are represented by polgyonal models, but most of the enemies, as well as the stages themseves are super-sharp sprites. That aside, most of the other things the game does to build upon the basic concept put forth by Space Harrier are apparently attempt to "modernise" the genre, for better and worse.

 

There are two playable characters to choose from whenever you play, and they are actually different to each other: one can fly around the screen like the Harrier of lore and legend, while the other runs along the ground, but can double jump to evade ground hazards and shoot at airbound enemies, and does all these things a lot more quickly. There are also two modes in which to play: arcade and story. The game's clearly been designed with story mode in mind, though, with arcade put in as a concession to those who prefer purely skill-based play in their shooting games.

 

Arcade mode is what you'd expect: you pick a character and then you play through all of the stages in order, until you complete the game or get killed. However, there are twenty-four stages spread across six planets, and each stage is about five minutes long. So playing through arcade mode means concentrating on shooting and avoiding stuff for two solid hours! By contrast, story mode lets you start from any planet you've previously reached (even if you reached it in arcade mode!), and it also has unlockable permanent upgrades. It also has lots of cutscenes between stages, though they are mercifully skippable.

 

The big gameplay gimmick the game has to offer is the HDCPC meter, and its various uses. It slowly charges over time, and when it's full, you can press a button to spend it in one of three ways: projecting a shield over yourself to pretect you from a single hit, summoning a robot buddy to fly around and shoot enemies until you take damage, or shooting a load of homing beams at every enemy currently onscreen. The shield is he most important one, and it feels like success in the game hinges upon keeping it up as much as possible. There's also times when the homing beams are very useful, too, of course. The kindest thing to do regarding the robot buddy is to move on without mentioning its relative usefulness.

 

Angelian Trigger isn't a perfect successor to Space Harrier and the neglected genre it represents, but it is a game that's decently fun enough to play, and the more I've played it, the more I've grown to like it. It's definitely worth your time, I think. What's weird about it, though, is that in a bizarre circumstance from days gone by, it's a Japan-only release, on Switch at least (I think there's an international release on PC). Did you even know that that kind of nonsense still happened, outside of tie-ins to gameshows and the like? There's obviously no language barrier though, unless you really want to know what's being said in the cutscenes.

Steel Dragon EX (PS2)

 Steel Dragon EX is a compilation of two games: Steel Dragon, which is a port of the 1997 arcade game Shienryu, and an all-new game, Steel Dragon Evolution, which was called Shienryu Explosion on the Japanese version of the disc (Simple 2000 Series Vol. 37: The Shooting ~Double Shienryu~). I'm going to be talking here mainly about the latter, though, since there's a much more interesting home port of the original Shienryu that I want to give its own review someday.

 

Shienryu Explosion (though I've been playing the PAL version, the JP title sounds so much better) is a surprisingly simple game, considering it came out in 2003. You only have your regular shots and your bomb, no secondary weapons or any other Cave-style weirdness. Furthermore, the scoring system is also simple, though it seems like it hasn't really been properly implemented. When you shoot enemies, they'll almost always die with a 256x multiplier applied to the points scored from them. The exceptions I've seen being the third ship's homing missiles, which give a 128x multiplier, and when you kill enemies with your bomb, which gives a 512x multiplier. 

 

Enemies also drop little gold cross-shaped stars when they explode, and when you use your bomb, enemy bullets are also turned into stars, as are a boss' bullets at the time of its death. Obviously, these are points items, and less obviously, they give extra lives when you collect enough of them. As is the case with destroyed enemies, there's also a multiplier applied to the points you get from them. unlike with destroyed enemies, the multiplier seems to have been (somewhat) properly implemented: if you're shooting when you pick up a star, it's worth 1x point, if you're not, it's worth 256x. You also move a lot faster when you're not shooting, so that's nice. But if you're zooming around collecting stars and not shooting, there's still going to be new enemies appearing onscreen. So you get more points essentially for letting more weak enemies spend time onscreen shooting at you.

 

There is, according to legend, a reason why aspects of Shienryu Explosion might feel (or even be!) a little half-baked, though. Supposedly, this whole project was put together as a kind of fundraising exercise, and Explosion in particular was kind of jimmied together from a very early version of a game that would release on Dreamcast a few years later in 2007 (and on several other systems long after that), Triggerheart Exelica. I think the fundraising pat of the story is almost definitely true, and I think the other half of the story is pretty believable, too. Triggerheart Exelica is definitely a much more mechanically complex game, and it's also a lot more sophisticated aesthetically, too. But it also came out four years after Shienryu Explosion. So there's plenty of time between the two for the project to go through a lot of evolution into something completely different.

 

Shienryu Explosion/Steel Dragon Evolution is a pretty good game. If you can pick it up cheap, or if you just want to try out a PS2-exclusive STG via emulation, it's definitely worth doing so. Oddly, the PAL version's price seems to fluctuate wildly: some places list it for the merest pittance, while others are charging hundreds of pounds for it. Strange.

Dragon Drive: D-Masters Shot (Gamecube)

 After a long run of excellent games right from their formation, across the Mega Drive, Saturn, Dreamcast, Playstation, N64, and Game Boy Advance, Treasure entered the twenty-first century with a lot of goodwill from a lot of people. Unfortunately, they quickly squandered it with a bunch of games like Wario World that weren't bad, but they also weren't up to the high standard people had come to expect from Treasure. (And there was also Stretch Panic, which was bad, but weird enough that people were willing to overlook it a little.) Dragon Drive is one of their games from this era that didn't get released outside of Japan, and as a tie-in to a long-since forgotten anime and manga, probably would itself have been completely forgotten by now were it not from such a famous developer.

 

The first thing you'll probably think upon starting the first stage of Dragon Drive is "hey, this is like Panzer Dragoon, but in the modern day and also one of the free range stages from Lylat Wars!", which is fairly accurate. You start the game as a kid dangling underneath a baby dragon, flying over a modern city, shooting at other dragons. The dragon quickly grows to full size, and you have a boss fight. Then there's a linear rail shooting stage, to make things even more like Panzer Dragoon! And those are the three main stage types in the game: free range-style stages where you fly around an enclosed area shooting down enemies, linear rail shooter stages, and boss fights, which are like the free range stages, but there's only one enemy that has insane amounts of health.

 

The plot concerns a competitive virtual reality game about dragon piloting, and the bosses you fight are the other players. I do find this kind of plot pretty weak, especially in a videogame: I'm already playing a game, why am I playing as someone else playing a game? Where are the stakes for the characters here? However, it does allow for some variety in where the stages take place, without having to justify all these different locales. In the couple of hours I played, I saw the aforementioned modern city and attached highways, as well as a desert decorated with giant monster skeletons at sunset, a fantasy castle town at night, and a small jungle island. And of course, the sight of huge dragons flying and shooting breath weapons at each other is really cool.

 

There's power-ups too, in the form of various cards you can collect in the stages. You can hold up to four of these, each assigned to a direction on the d-pad for use. They come in three flavours, too: red ones increase your attack power for a while, green ones restore some of your health, and yellow ones do various different things, like having a big explosion emanate from your dragon, damaging all nearby enemies, or creating a holographic copy of your dragon to draw enemy fire. The use of cards in this way feels very much of-its-time. A lot of Japanese kids shows that weren't specifically about card games had some kind of card element to them around this time: Digimon Tamers, Kamen Rider Blade, and so on.

 

Dragon Drive D-Masters Shot is a decent enough game. I've definitely played much worse rail shooters, and if it were developed by someone like Tamsoft or Sandlot, it'd probably be enjoying a re-appraisal as a forgotten classic of the Gamecube library. Unfortunately, it's by Treasure, and like the aforementioned Wario World, it's one of those games that broke the spell they had over a lot of people around the turn of the century, by being merely okay instead of the excellent games we'd grown accustomed to them releasing. The biggest shame is that they don't seem to have ever recovered from this era. They haven't released any new games in over a decade (another kids' anime tie-in on 3DS, Gaist Crusher God), though they announced a comeback in 2022, we've seen nothing of that yet. Anyway, this game's pretty good, you probably won't regret seeking it out and playing it with the recent translation patch applied.

Yokushin: Gigawing Generations (PS2)

 Alongside Gunbird 2, the Dreamcast port of the original Gigawing was one of the shooting games that really got me interested in the genre. At the time, I'd seen nothing like it before: not only was it my first danmaku STG, with enemy agression like I'd never seen before, but it also had some other elements that added their own spice. The story scenes between stages, where characters melodramatically despaired about the cruelties man inflicts upon man, as well as the specific horrors of the war unfolding before their eyes. There's also the soundtrack, while not exactly to my tastes, does a great job of setting the mood, not just while you're playing, but also with specific situations, like how the game over music is so calm and relaxing compared to the noise and chaos of the game, and cuts in so abruptly as soon as you die, giving the feeling of a soldier dying on the battlefield and immediately finding themselves in paradise. The most important, and most famous ingredient of both the original Gigawing and the series in general, though is its scoring and self-defence system, that are intertwined as one.

 

By holding the fire button for a few seconds, you emit a forcefield that reflects enemy bullets back at them, doing big damage, and turning them into medals. Each medal you collect increases the value of every subsequent medal, and also the multiplier constantly applied to your score. By the end of the first stage of the first game, you can easily get your multiplier into the millions, with your score already reaching the tens of trillions. The second game leant really hard into a bombastic look and sound, with a WWII-like fantasy setting. It also added an optional "reflect laser" weapon, which converted enemy bullets into auto-aimed laserbeams instead of directly reflecting them. It also added cascades, whereby having a large amount of medals onscreen at ones would magically cause big golden waterfalls of hundreds more medals appear out of nowhere.

 

That absurdly long preamble, despite not mentioning Yokushin Gigawing Generations, says so much about it. The unfortunate fact is that, as much as I love the first two games in this series, I just don't care for this third entry. Now, I don't particularly dislike it. It plays fine, and it can get its hooks in your for an hour or so here and there like any half-decent STG can, but it makes me feel nothing. It's just there, existing. It doesn't have the melodrama or the aesthetics of the previous games. Though the numbers have gone up in regard to the multiplier and the score, the cascades and reflect laser are both gone, too, and that really feels like a step backwards.

 

Everything about this game looks, sounds, and feels cheap in a way that its forebears didn't. To use a cinematic allegory, think of the ninties live action Addams Family movies. The first two were theatrical releases, with lavish production design, great scripts, and perfectly-cast actors. Then a few years later, there was a third, straight-to-video movie entitled Addams Family Reunion. Barely anyone's heard of it and even fewer have seen it, there are no returning cast members, and it looks like an episode of a kids TV show (because it's actually a pilot for one, the somehow even cheaper The NEw Addams Family). Yokushin Gigawing Generations is the videogame equivalent of Addams Family Reunion: it's not painful to watch or anything, and while it's a massive step down from what came before it in every way, if you really want some more Gigawing, that's what you technically get here.

Karous (Dreamcast)

 You might notice that the screenshots on this review are a combination of arcade and Dreamcast shots. This is due to my own technological ineptitude, and it doesn't really matter, since I mostly played the Dreamcast version and that's what I'm writing about, and also they're identical anyway, the only difference being that the Dreamcast version has a fanmade English translation. 

 

Karous is from Milestone, a developer mostly known for shooting games, especially their late-release Dreamcast duology, Radirgy and this one. It came out a year after Radirgy, and the first two things you'll notice about it are how much it doesn't look like its forebear (Radirgy had a very colourful Akihabara-inspired look, while Karous goes for a moodier tone, with muted colours and lots of grey), and how much it appears to play like its forebear. 

 

Like Radirgy, Karous arms you with a gun, a sword, and a shield. The gun and sword are each assigned to a button, and the shield appears in front of you when you aren't using either of the other two. You also, like in Radirgy, have a forcefield that projects outtwards to protect you and continually damage any enemies it touches, and it can be used whenever a meter that incrementally fill every time you damage an enemy or cancel an enemy bullet completely fills up. You can even hit power ups and points items with your sword to change them into different things!

 

What's different, though, is the scoring system, which offers a stark contrast to that seen in the earlier game, which had you constantly trying to fill meters as quickly as possible and collect items and so on, and never taking a break. In Karous, the scoring system and the power-up system are linked. Whenever you use one of your three main weapons, they gain experience, and gradually level up (don't worry, it's still a completely linear STG, so there's no grinding and the levelling is more like Radiant Silvergun than an RPG), increasing their power very slightly every time. You also have a constant multiplyer that's made up of all three weapon levels combined. So again, like Radiant Silvergun: playing for survival and playing for score are one and the same. You want you weapons to be more powerful, and making them so is also how you score more points.

 

Though I was initially put off by the miserable look of the game, and the fact that the 3DS sequel/spin-off Karous: The Beast of Re:Eden was awful, but Karous is a game I just keep going back to! The basic Milestone mechanics are enjoyable as they are, and the ways in which it's less stressful than Radirgy have their own appeal, too. You should definitely give it a try!

Air Diver (Mega Drive)

 I've started to unkindly describe Ace Combat-style 3D aerial combat games as "slowly following a little dot on your radar waiting until you can actually see and fire a homing missile at the enemy", and while that's pretty bad in actual 3D games with polygon graphics where you and the enemies actually occupy positions in a properly defined space. Air Diver bravely attempts to make a game in that genre using only 2D sprites, which aren't even actually scaling, since it's a Mega Drive game!

 

I can see why the developers wanted to try doing this: Afterburner II is a pretty good game, and it fared surprisingly well in its port to Mega Drive, so why not try putting together a game with the homing missile-based gameplay of Afterburner II, but instead of being a completely linear rail shooter, try and simulate a more realistic scenario, where the same enemy planes can fly all around you? The problem is that becuse this is a faux-sprite scaling game, you can only fly straight ahead, with the ability to kind of do a barrel roll or a loop being the extent of your maneuverability.

 

This means that when enemy planes fly behind you, all you can really do is a loop, to try and fly over and behind them. Or at least, that's what I thought, but this only puts the enemy in front of you some of the time. Similarly, enemies will often fly off to the side, and there's just no effective way to chase them there either. So even worse than chasing the little radar dots, you spend the majority of your time in this game waiting for the dots to place themselves within your field of vision.

 

Making this even worse is the way the stages are structured. There's three parts to each: first, you fight lots of regualr enemy planes, who all die in one hit. Then, a single super-plane, that's a different colour, and takes a bunch of hits to kill. Finally, each stage has some kind of gigantic futuristic sky fortress thing, that's so big it has to be portrayed as a background, rather than a sprite. The super-plane is the hardest of the three on all of the stages I've tried, as the fortresses just need you to constonatly shoot and move until they're dead. No chasing or aiming necessary!

 

Mentioning the fortresses makes me think that I should bring up the game's threadbare, but also absurd plot. A previously unknown terrorist organisation from the middle east has suddenly taken over the entire world. Despite being an unknown, unnamed organisation, they have hundreds (possibly thousands) of fighter planes, as well as the aforementioned giant sky fortresses. The only part of the world left unconquered is an airbase in the south Pacific, from whence a flying transporter containing your plane is deployed to save the world.

 

This does actually bring up a structural point to the game that doesn't make it more fun, but which is slightly interesting. You can tackle the stages in any order, and each one also tells you an estimated chance of success on the world map screen. However, your transport has a limited amount of fuel, and there is, according to the manual, a specific route that you have to figure out to be able to tackle every stage without running out of transporter fuel (which means an instant game over).

 

In case you haven't already figured it out, I didn't really enjoy Air Diver. It's a shame, because it looks kind of cool, and the soundtrack is pretty good, too. But unfortunately, it's a boring, frustrating chore, and not worth your time. I am kind of curious about the two sequels that apparently came out on SNES, though. Which that system's focus on scaling and rotation, maybe it's able to do a better job of realising the developers' ambitions?

Purified (PS Vita)

 

 This game apparently came out a while ago, though I only learned of it last week (and, to be fair, it does still call itself Ver 0.9, so I guess it's still not totally complete). Most PS Vita homebrew so far has been either ports of PC and Android games, or various utilities, with a few fairly small-scale games here and there, too. I don't want to diminish any of those things, they all contribute to making the Vita a fun console to own. But Purified has really blown me away. This could easily have been a full commercial release!

 

It's a third person shooter, with a very turn-of-the-century edgy mallgoth look to it, in which you play as a beefy space-catholic cyborg tasked with killing the endless hordes of demonic cyborgs and their possessed victims that are beseiging the last human city. This war takes the form of three survival skirmish stages, which can be played in any order. You pick one, and you fight against increasingly difficult waves of enemies and sometimes bosses. They aren't endless, as one of the stats tracked is how many times you've won each stage (though my total for all three is still currently zero), and I suspect there might be a secret fourth stage, based on some of the in-game text?

 

Which brings me onto the subject of what an amazingly complete package this game is! As well as the game's three main stages, there's also an optional tutorial stage, which is its own complete map with unique models and textures and stuff. There's a sound test, which lets you listen to the game's soundtrack (obviously), while looking at a rotating 3D model of a soundtrack CD case. There's even an ingame encyclopedia, with pictures and lore for every character, location, weapon, item, and concept in the game! And like you can tell from the screenshots, this looks like an actual game put out by a big company (maybe a game that was put out twenty-five years ago, but a big company game nonetheless). 

 

Is the game actually good, though? Yes! It didn't click with me at first, and a few aspects felt a little clunky, like how you can't just shoot, you have to hole L to aim, then press R to shoot, and you have to press a seperate reload button to reload, rather than the fire button doing it when you're empty. But after a few plays, the game's vision really became clear: you're this big heavy man-monster, you have to consider every action because the actions are weighty. This weight, of course, makes the actions all the more satisfying, and there's some great smaller design decisions that have been made that play into that. For example, the first few enemies in a stage will typically be these skinless people who are much shorter than you and not much threat at all, and those few seconds you get to spend casually walking around, thoughtlessly slicing them up with your melee attack are a very fun warm for what's to come.

 

I definitely recommend this game, I've been having a lot of fun with it, and I think it'll remain a mainstay on my Vita for a long time to come. An interesting thing about its distribution is that while you can get it for free from VitaDB, you can also pay what you want on itch, which I think makes it the only PS Vita game you can digitally buy in 2025! The only really negative thing I have to say about it is that one time I had to exit a stage via the pause menu because something went wrong, and no enemies were spawning!

War Games: Defcon 1 (Playstation)

 Two of the first things you'll be confronted with regarding this game are anachronisms. Firstly, it's a tie-in to a movie released fifteen years earlier, and secondly, despite being released in 1998, this game has no save option, and if you want to keep your progress, you have to do so via a password system! But what is the game? It's one that has very little in common with the movie whose name it bears, being a 3D shooting game that plays kind of like an inferior spin-off from the Strike series of games. No hacking or global tension here at all!

 

So, you can play as either NORAD (humans in tanks and jeeps and such) or WOPR (various different robot things), and you're  given a series of worldwide missions, which mainly involve going to part of a map, killing all the enemies there, then going to a different part of the map and killing everyone there. It's all kind of arbitrary, especially if you accidentally wander to the wrong part of the map and kill the enemies there, at which point you'll fail the mission, literally being told you did things in the wrong order and ruined everything. Compare to the aforementioned Strike games, in which you could mostly take on a stage's objectives in any order, and sometimes there might be a tactical advantage to be gained from taking things in a certain order.

 

There's other problems, too. The biggest being the controls. Though there's lots of vehicles to control in the game, they all control the same, and they all use the "swivel and accelerate" system (or "tank controls," if you prefer), with no capacity for strafing. Furthermore, you can only shoot directly in front of you in all of them. So combat against other units means you and one enemy staying still and shooting at each other until one of you explodes. If the enemy explodes , you move on and do the same thing to the next one. If you explode, either you start back at your base with the next vehicle in your allocation for the current stage, or if you were already on the final one, you fail the mission. 

 

Aesthetically, it's fine I guess. It's got a similar look to other western-developed Playstation games that take place on battlefields, the one that keeps coming to mind in particular being Populous: The Beginning, despite the wildly different themes and settings between the two games. But there's nice terrain, cute little buildings decorating the place, and so on. I even really like the models for some of the NORAD vehicles! Something I have to address, though, is that the game does suffer from "the western mecha problem": all of the mecha are just ugly grey boxes plopped on top of a pair of chicken legs like a mechanical version of Baba Yaga's hut. The more powerful the mecha, the bigger the grey box, and not a single arm or hint of aesthetic flair among them.

 

Despite all the bad things I've had to say about War Games Defcon 1, I actually don't hate this game. It's okay. I think if you were to pick it up, you'd probably play a couple of stages, think to yourself "that was alright, I'll have to get back to it some time", and then you'll never play or think about it ever again. But you probably won't hate it!