Line of Fire - Arcade

You're firing, in lines... Maybe.

Sega seem to enjoy milking this game engine in particular for over the top gunnage (it's a word now, I said so) and for giving people the chance to be Rambo. Having reviewed Jurassic Park back in the J section of these reviews, I thought I'd take a gander at Line of Fire.

Missions are complicated and involve a lot of thought and consideration.

The arcade of Line of Fire, sported two heavy machine guns mounted to the cabinet in both the stand up and sit-down versions of the machine which added an extra level of immersion to the game while the game itself did away entirely with the idea of ammo, reloading, driving or guiding any real vestige of control related to gaming and just have you on rails and shooting stuff, you don't even overheat the guns and the power remains at the maximum. Seriously, if this was a gun in the military, EVERYONE would want it. (I already do)

The game puts a huge focus on the importance of timing.

The plot is pretty much that though in Line of Fire, someone has made these guns and you're part of a team (or solo) that have gone in to steal them. In doing so, you get caught and decide to use the guns to escape while kidnapping a driver in a jeep (I think, against his will) and make a Beeline for the nearest pick up point to be rescued while fighting off everything you could possibly imagine that an army would throw at you at even more.

Shots taken at your are often hard to see and camouflaged.

So off you go through the game of Line of Fire shooting everything from soldiers with rifles, grenades, knives, rocket launchers and more to tanks, helicopters, jets, AWACS (which are on your side... not very stealthy really) and a whole host of assorted vehicles that tend to act as bosses at the end of levels to whittle away your health bar and make you use up your explosive "kill all on screen" shots.

Enemy vehicles often blend in with the scenary.

There's a significant challenge within the game in that Line of Fire just bombards you figuratively and literally, with an enormous amount of enemies in faster time than most games will introduce their whole line up, in just one level. The action rare, if ever, lets up but you've got infinite bullets and you'll going to have to make them count while cutting swathes of damage through line after line of opponents and obstructions.

There's multiple routes of travel and most will have very few enemies on them.

While the sound effects in Line of Fire are fairly suitable, I can't say the same for the music which is usually drowned out by the shooting, explosions, bombs, rockets, people dying, people throwing things at you and pretty much everything else in this game. Thankfully, you're not going to be missing much with the absence of music and the focus on shooting and killing takes priority, not such a bad thing but to be honest, this is ALL this game is about.

Bosses are often a long distance affair.

It can be rather intimidating at times in Line of Fire when you're being nothing less than overwhelmed by the sheer volume of attackers and assaults on the player. At times your only real option to escape damage is to use up one of your bomb/rockets or hope that soon after that particular point, there will be health items to shoot and/or bombs to shoot as well to boost your stock of explosive One Hit Kills.

This game causes image captions to be lies... Maybe.

If you can manage to navigate through killing as many threats as possible and also to predict where rockets and heavier vehicles will spawn from, you can last quite a while and enjoy some longevity from your credit, you might even want to play it through to the end just to see the bigger and more powerful bosses, but like other gun-games, it's almost certain you'll want to play it once and leave it at that.