Fire Power

The Good
In Firepower you control a small tank and your objective is to penetrate enemy territory, locate the enemy's main base, capture the flag and take it back to your own base. There are three tanks to choose from with different amounts of landmines, fuel capacity, armor and space for rescued P.O.W.'s.

Firepower's two-player mode offers some great hot-seat action (split screen). There's even the option to play the game against another player via a modem making this 1988 title one of the first games with that feature (another one is the similarly themed Modem Wars). However, I never played the game that way. In the two-player mode each player has an unlimited amount of lives. The game is not over until one of the players manages to take the opponents flag back to his command center. You can choose to ignore the flag for a while and instead chase each other around the map & try to kill each other; turning the game into a version of Combat. Or you can just go rampaging through the other's base like a madman on a killing spree. Destroy civilian buildings and run over the little men inside with your tank, place landmines in front of hospitals or the command center and watch what happens when your enemy returns home with a vehicle full of rescued P.O.W.'s, blow up your prisons so your opponent can't rescue his P.O.W.'s.... total carnage! It's really a game for the little sadist inside you. When I used to play this against my brother games usually turned out that way; also because of the split-screen you could see what the other one was up to which always prompted immediate revenge.

Anyway you get to blow up lots of stuff which is always good news. Explosion equals satisfaction. Silent Software must agree with this philosophy. It's also the fundamental principle behind their Return Fire games.

The controls are easy. There's a build in slow down function which let's you change the game-speed to match the speed of your CPU (it's not enough for the current Pentiums however).

The maps in Firepower are quite large and in the two-player mode it's fun to just roam around till you're shot down or destroyed because of lack of fuel. There are different maps, which are loaded at random, and because of their size (and because everything looks alike :-< ) you can never completely memorize their lay-out.

The Bad
The single-player mode is rather boring. You have a small base of your own which is surrounded by a very large enemy base. Your base has its own cannons but they have no use because there are no enemy tanks. You neither have a flag nor landmines. You have only five lives to explore the large map which is not enough for one to start wandering since the computer base is filled with landmines and enemy choppers trying to kill you. Moreover the lack of variety hurts the game when there's not a human opponent around. There's only so much fun in killing 384 consecutive gun turrets. I wish there were some extra enemies, not just turrets and choppers.

• Sometimes your tank gets stuck on the scenery.
• Your tank moves faster than the top-down camera. Your tank doesn't stay in the middle of the screen but moves towards the edges making it hard to see what's ahead (like a landmine for example).
• The graphics and sounds are only average and there is no music. The graphics are what I call "functional" (they do the job but nothing more).

The Bottom Line
Fire Power is a game of "capture the flag" with tanks that was clearly designed with two players in mind. Play it with another person to enjoy it cause the single-player mode is completely forgettable.

The Good
Back in 1988, the Amiga was the ultimate home computer, with the greatest graphics, sound and interface around. This game was one the gems that really showcased it features. Digital-quality sound and a scrolling playfield to wrack havoc on the enemy--what could be better? This game featured little plot to hold the action together, just like most great '80s era games.

The name of the developer, Silent Software, was, of course, a joke since this game not only featured sound, but lots of REALLY LOUD sound effects. A line on the bottom of the opening screen even prompted you to turn up your speakers really high, as if the sounds would otherwise be too subtle to hear.

The scrolling 32 color playfield was the real gem of this game. The player's tank always stayed centered while the playfield moved around it. The perspective was top-down which, though antiquated by today's standards, was perfect for this game during this era.

Though I never finished this game--I always had too much fun blowing things up to actually bother to rescue the hostages--it stands out in my mind as one of the great Amiga "killer apps" of the 1980s.

The Bad
The sound effects (really big explosion!) got redundant after a while. Yes, we know it was a really big explosion! But why does it sound identical to the last one? And the one before that?

The Bottom Line
A great '80s era game that showcased the Amiga's features and made no bones about blowing things up!