The more astute among you will have noticed thst this game takes more than a little inspiration from Data East's 1990 arcade game The Cliffhanger: Edward Randy. That game saw the eponymous hero fighting off villains while standing atop moving vehicles and in other precarious situations. It's probably the best Indiana Jones videogame, despite not having the license. The 2011 PC game Cliff Hanger, from Shuyusha, takes the expected indie approach to making an update: though superficial aspects of the game are simplified (ie. all the stages have the same situation, that of fighting atop the wings of large aircraft), it refines and expands upon the game's mechanics.
The main way in which it does this is in how your attacks work. Though Edward Randy attacked with a whip, mehanically, it acted much like any other weapon would, always going in a straight line, and mostly in one of eight directions. The chain with which you attack in this game is a lot shorter, and you can't swing from it, but it is more versatile in other ways. A neutral attack sees you swing the chain downwards from above your head, and since your platforms are usually tiled, this is pretty useful for hitting enemies that are slightly up- or downhill from you. Up and attack gives you a straight diagonal upwards attack, while forward and attack goes straight out in front of you, as does attacking while crouched.
Most interesting, though, is the attack you get from pressing an upwards diagonal with the attack button. It's a launcher! And because of how you hit every enemy that's in range when you attack, you can launch a whole crowd of enemies at once, for midair violent fun! Of course, this is a game with a heavy emphasis on managing large crowds of enemies, so there'll always be more of them around to spoil your fun. But that only serves to make it more satisfying when you thoroughly wreck a bunch of guys at once. As well as all these normal attacks, you also have a projectile attack that takes a couple of seconds to charge, but does a lot of damage, taking out most normal enemies in one hit.
Though the stages all take place atop aircraft, there's still variety to be found between them. The backgrounds change, of course, but the main thing is that they all (for as far as I've managed to get into the game, at least) introduce at least two new kinds of enemies. There's generic soldiers weilding various kinds of weapons, jetpack girls flying around firing energy blasts, and even stuff like guys in helicopters flying around strafing you with machine gun fire! Going by the definition of "purity" that I've put forward before, it's definitely a very pure game: all the enemies have clear, definite roles, as do all the moves and attacks you can perform. The bosses also each have a few attack and movement patterns that you can learn and react to.
I've mostly praised this game so far, but it's not without flaws. A small one that you'll get over quickly is that at first it seems a little stiff, a little repetitive, and it feels like the enemies can all take way too much of a beating. But once you get into the flow of how the game works, those problems should fade away. There is, however, a bigger problem that's almost the exact opposite, in that I didn't really notice it until I'd played the game a few times, and it only gets more annoying over time. Jumping attacks just don't seem to work properly: the input for them is very stiff and strange, and you have to kind of jump, wait a beat, then attack for it to come off. The worst part is that this feels so unnatural that I suspect it might be a programming error, rather than a poor deliberate design choice.
For all its flaws, though, Cliff Hanger is a very fun game. It's another one I got from DLSite, where it only costs a few pounds. If you're curious about it, I definitely recommend picking it up. (I've started mentioning where I get PC games because people were requesting it, but it still feels uncomfortably like an ad to me. There's nothing I can do about that though, really.)
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