Airwolf
Once upon a time in the 80s, there was a government of a certain large western power. This government decreed that to meet the stringent demands of modern warfare, a new weapon must be crafted – the Mach 1 plus attack helicopter; codenamed Airwolf. After it’s recovered by test pilot Stringfellow Hawke, he refuses to turn it back to the CIA. Yes, Stringfellow Hawke stole Airwolf, but if anyone stole this game, chances are excellent that they tried to bring it back.
Airwolf is one of those NES titles that tried to do more with the console than the console would really have any part of. This one joins the handful of games that attempted to make a first-person cockpit simulator out of monochrome textures and flat sprites. Top Gun tried this same trick, and equally sucked at it. The sky is one color of blue, the ground is one color of green, and two-dimensional planes occasionally appear to fire cloudy puffballs at you. You’d better love the look of old games and have a healthy imagination if you want to enjoy this game.
However, the biggest problem with Airwolf’s graphics isn’t just that they look ugly. Without any landmarks or visual terrain whatsoever, you have no idea where you are. You can’t even tell if you’re turning, because the horizon will always look the same – there’s no clouds or trees to show it. If the game didn’t provide you with a real-time map, it would be completely unplayable. But this means they could have just given you the map, since that’s all you’ll ever look at.
This might be a slightly better game if it gave you more to do. It does not. Every mission is introduced by a cutscene of your eyepatched commander (Archangel from the show. probably) instructing you to “go out and bring our people home.” You’re then shown a map of enemy territory, which always is made up of an airbase, a fuel dump, and some hostages. Loosely plot a path to the hostages.
Then you’re in enemy territory. Gun the engines, fly over the X on the map, gently touch down from a side view in a little rip-off of Choplifter, then gun the engines again until you’re out of the mission area. Every mission will last an absolute maximum of 30 seconds. You can destroy the airbase for points, or hit the fuel dump if you’re low on gas, but the mission areas are so small, the prisoners so few, and Airwolf so damned fast, that you’ll never need to.
That’s the entire game. Once the hostages are home, the game simply loops. The mission number is increased by one and the layout of the camp changes a bit, but you’ll always be saving hostages across all 25 missions. Shooting anything just gives you useless points. This goes back to the point about not needing anything but the map – since you only have to avoid enemy planes, and never have missions that require you to engage them or destroy airbases or whatever, every mission is reduced to flying to a point on the map, then hauling ass out to the edge of the map.
The controls are confusing. Start and Select accelerate and decelerate your craft. Up and down on the D-Pad – what you would expect to regulate your speed – are instead used to raise and lower your altitude. This is a completely useless feature, since the only visual representation that you’re getting closer to the ground is your altimeter in the cockpit. Your altitude affects the gameplay in no way whatsoever, except to give you another gauge to keep your eye on.
A and B fire missiles and guns, if you feel the need to shoot at the planes swarming around, or more usefully, shoot down cloudy missiles launched at you. Most times you can simply fly around at full speed and avoid them. They made Airwolf too good in a franchise all about how good Airwolf is. Sound is average, with a nice rendition of the show’s theme – the only music in the game – and a lot of lackluster sound effects for the rest of the time.
Airwolf could certainly be better, but even then it wouldn’t be great. It offers nothing to do justice to the fans of the show, and offers nothing exciting or original for the rest of us. As far as I’m concerned, Stringfellow can keep his stolen Airwolf, because this game has proven to me that I want no part of it.
The Good
Airwolf has fantastic hostage-finding and hostage-rescuing abilities, which is great…
The Bad
…because rescuing hostages is all Airwolf will do.