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?