Action Fighter

The Good
Lots of action. Driving, shooting, flying, power ups. Control was fairly good. Good background music.

The Bad
I can not remember disliking anything about this game.

The Bottom Line
You are a motorcycle. A Car. A Plane. You shoot and weave your way through traffic and swarms of enemies. Collect bonuses and Power ups. Defeat the boss and move on to the next level.

The Good
Attention to details and enemies: On the ground, if you're not careful you can crash off the pier and into the water. Helicopters drop bombs on you while you're navigating the streets and enemy cars.

The Bad
It's a bit too hard. Without cheat codes, I have yet to complete it.

The Bottom Line
Some would say Action Fighter is a cheap Spy Hunter clone. The NES fanboys wipe poop all over this title. For some of us, we didn't have an NES and this was a top-notch game for those of us that didn't know what Spy Hunter was. Maybe it is a Spy Hunter clone, but it certainly is not a cheap clone. It's also difficult to classify. Is it a driving game? Is it a flying game? It is clearly a breakthrough title that breaks the barriers of what we know a game to be. Instead of it being either one or the other, it's both. At it's core, this is an unforgivingly tough game that throws all kinds of elements out at you. Battles take place on the ground, and in the air.

The Good
The arcade game was a clever design, with a good variety in the gameplay as well as a good difficulty curve, well thought-out level layouts, good power-ups in both sections, and plenty of excitement. Darting between cars on your bike as you try to shoot them out, while ducking across into the Sega vans for bonuses and collecting the upgrade tokens made for good gameplay in the first section, while the second was an adequate 1942-style blaster.

Technically it wasn't a particularly complicated game, and Core Design were well up to the job of converting it. Graphics are crisp and sharp, the handling is precise, with a noticable difference between vehicles, and the road scrolls smoothly, at just the right pace

The Bad
The second section suffers a little bit from colour clash, and bullets are sometimes hard to see in the heat of the moment as a result.

Also, there seem to be a few graphical glitches at the top of the screen, which are occasionally enough to be a distraction.

The Bottom Line
A rather belated conversion of an arcade game in which you must rescue the President from terrorists. The game is split into two distinct sections, both vertically-scrolling - the first involves travelling down a road which occasionally splits across into junctions, while trying to destroy as many of the inhabiting vehicles as possible, and the second involves flying through the sky over the sea shooting down enemy air ordinance. You have 1000 seconds in which to complete all this, and are given 5 lives to progress through six levels with.

It makes for an enjoyable little game, which will take a while to get through.