Soldiers of Fortune

The Good
This is a Bitmaps Brothers game, so the look and feel is awesome.

The game mechanics is a mix between Gauntlet and Ikari Warriors, yet I like it more than I ever liked those other two and for a good reason. It's better.

There are always enough baddies to keep you on the edge of your seat, but not enough to make you feel overwhelmed. Some look crazy but they're all cool and each world sports its own set of them, so you only get the giant frogs on the first world, the black blobs on the second one, the walking hands on the next one and so on.

While there are no secret levels, there are several ways of entering, exiting and going through some levels. That makes the game very replayable. When you take one route, the other is blocked and the only way to know what's over there is to play again. Each route is filled with goodies, so whatever you choose, you're not going to regret it.

Having six characters to mix and match also makes the game very replayable. And your sidekick, while not always useful (read below), at least doesn't get in the way. If he's left behind, he'll be teleported to the current screen, and you can always pass through him.

The Bad
The music is good, but there's only one background track for sixteen levels. Why they couldn't hire some guy to add more music? Same thing with the sound effects. Why so few of them?

Eight-way scrolling games have never been a favorite genre of mine, but the few I've played at least let the player shoot and move at the same time. On this game, the player can do one thing or another, but not both. It's no deal breaker, but it's not the best way to play neither.

The eight-way scrolling also makes your CPU-controlled sidekick very unreliable. If there's no angle for him to shoot, he just stand there until the monster reach a place he can shoot at or he moves accidentally to a better position when he follows you. This limitation makes some levels harder than they already are.

If you're one of the few who are still playing on a console, there's one more thing. Instead of getting a password after every level, you get one every other level. That means that dying on even-numbered levels forces you to replay not one but two levels. That's not fun.

The Bottom Line
Like Contra, The Chaos Engine is hard but not unbeatable, and like Metal Slug, it offers plenty of reasons to play it again and again and again.

The Good
This game was one of the best Bitmap games, a well thought out storyline for an Action game. Play with the computer or with a friend and you are set on blasting baddies and collecting as many extra powers as you can. Once you have completed the game, the task becomes one on using different characters and finding the maximum amount of treasure for each level.

The Bad
First played this game on the Amiga where the music is far better than that of the DOS version that seems to have been rewritten, the RISC OS version has been converted better. It appears the music is the only bad tiding as the rest of the game is brilliant. It's age is showing in that the graphics are only 16 colours but they are done in a Amiga-esque way to hide that.

The Bottom Line
If you like an action game with a bit more brain-power to put behind and like collecting various tokens and listening to cool effects then this is the game for you. Now starting to show what real games were like moons ago.

The Good
The Bitmap Brothers, a well-known game company based in the UK, produced good quality action games like Xenon 2: Megablast, Magic Pockets, Cadaver: The Payoff, and Gods, as well as this game, The Chaos Engine.

The story is self-explanatory enough. An experimenter with time space and early computers made a huge mistake of creating a bizarre machine, which he called “The Chaos Engine”. Soon the machine became very powerful and turned against its creator, causing a cloud of chaos to descend over the land and turning all humans and animals into beasts. And now The Chaos Engine must be destroyed in order to restore peace and beauty to the land.

Six mercenaries are offered the job: Mercenary, Brigand, Gentleman, Navvie, Thug, and Preacher. Each mercenary has their own advantages and disadvantages, and their own firepower. When players start the game, they have the choice of playing against the CPU or another player.

Once done, each player choose their mercenary. Whether that mercenary is good or not will depend on how much speed, wisdom, skill, health, and firepower they have got. Also each character has their own special attacks. For example, Gentleman can use maps to navigate his way through each level, while Navvie uses dynamite to blast enemies in a direction he is facing.

Once done, the game begins. Each player has low firepower and less speed, wisdom, health, and skill at the start, but can upgrade these after every second level, or obtain an extra life (with the maximum of 30). There are four worlds to complete with each world consisting of four levels, and each world has players navigating through forests, workshops, mansions, sewers, and cellars, and blasting beasts in the process. A password is given at the end of each world, which players can input that allows them to start at the beginning of a world.

The main objective of the game is to find and activate several nodes that are scattered through each level, and collect gold and silver keys that will cause bridges, a set of stairs, or secret passages to appear so that you can explore other parts of the level. The number of nodes you have to activate is listed in the middle of the status bar. Once all the nodes have been activated, the level exit is opened. In several levels, there is more than one exit, and players will end up at a different place in the next level, depending on the path they take through the level.

Normally, when players kill an enemy, the enemy will leave behind gold or silver coins, which can be used to upgrade both mercenaries. The number of coins that each player collects is displayed next to the number of nodes. Also there are more items that players can collect rather than just coins. If players collect a yin-yang at a point in the level, for example, they restart at that point if they die. There’s also food to collect that will award extra health, power-ups that will upgrade firepower, special attacks, and of course, extra lives. When a level is complete, a screen of statistics comes up telling how many enemies they’ve destroyed, the number of nodes activated, how many coins the party collected, how many gold and silver keys that were collected, and so on.

The graphics are great, and the sound effects in this game are awesome. The music in the Amiga version is much better than the DOS version. I like the fact that the music changes whenever you explore different areas of a level, because this way you don’t get sick and tired of hearing the same music over and over again.

The Bad
This game can be difficult if neither of the mercenaries that were selected have the right firepower to take enemies down, especially the final boss. It isn’t easy to beat him, and may take you several hours to figure out how to beat him. It took me two days to find a tactic on how to beat him, and stick to it.

The Bottom Line
Overall, great game with excellent sound and graphics. If you finished this game already, it may not be over for you. There are other characters to choose from, and different firepower to equip them with. Also this game has different paths and alternative exits that you could take. Followed by a sequel. ***½