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.

Trog (NES)

Don't be fooled, the one-eyed guy is a complete git.

It's an odd format to follow, but there's many games that take the idea started roughly by pacman and try to improve upon it. Pacman being the great example of a maze based game where you run around the maze and collect all the icons in the maze while avoiding things that will hunt you down and kill you if you touch them. A simple, basic formula and yet it's commonly found in a lot of games in one guise or another. Trog is very much like pacman with a facelift, additions and changes but the core gameplay is still at the root.

But is it any good? Always the key question as pacman wasn't broken so there's no need to fix it, but can you improve?

Seriously, Bloop. Get a better name.

Trog plays out as a story of 1-2 dinosaurs running around maps, trying to collect eggs and avoid the ever evolving and eponymous Trogs. A creature that happily spawns from holes in the ground and will gleefully try to kill your dinosaurs. Once you've managed to collect all of your eggs, you'll be able to escape from the level via an exit sign and then be able to continue onwards and upwards to harder levels with more trogs and increasingly difficult trogs to contend again as well as various traps and tricks.

Teleporters, oil pits, trogs... No wonder dinosaurs died out.

For example, you can run out of the arena for a death. You can be bashed and devoured by the trogs, burnt up and cindered by fire hazards, swallowed up by oil pits, run over by stone wheels and a whole assortment of other comically cartoony methods of dying. (It's a stone wheel, but you're left with rubber tyre prints on your corpse, that's quite an evolution of technology!), later evolutions have bouncing springs... Not entirely sure if that's a step forwards or backwards.

One of many smoothly animated cutscenes. Quite impressive, all things considered...

You've a small assortment of weapons to counter this threat however. Firstly, you've the ability to punch your enemies and send them flying away, this includes most of their attack but not explicitly all of them. You can also become invulnerable for a short time with the horseshoe power up, you can increase your speed with red flowers but lose speed with blue mushrooms, you can also breath fire when eating a spicy chilli-dog, a pineapple that turns you into an invincible T-Rex mimic that crushes enemies and chomps up Trogs wherever possible and for the keen of sight, if you manage to watch at the start of the level for an egg that glimmers and pick up that egg as your LAST egg, in one life, you'll open a portal to warp ahead several levels.

Wheel weapons. Rolling forever around corners so that the middle zone here, is a deathtrap

You will likely need all the help you can get as you try to rush through the 50 levels the game has to offer, which gives you quite the longevity for a game of this nature. Maps, while repeat in style to give the perspective of different areas, don't repeat with actual layouts. Later levels make use of teleporters, warp doors, catapults and walkways to make it harder to progress but also to encourage the use and development of alternative tactics. Especially as the Trogs are also able to use warp doors, teleports, fall off the island and use the catapults.

HINT: This weapon will be coming up... next.

The biggest enemy however, by far, is the control system. Alternative known as the Fucking Controls! In which you'll often find yourself wandering off the island because you miss-timed when the change direction and you should be pressing the direction LONG BEFORE you get to the point in which you wish to turn otherwise the game will just happily keep you strolling onwards... into the long abyss of a pit, a trap, an enemy you could have and SHOULD have avoided or worst of all, the edge of the map and into water death zone.

Sometimes an arcade conversion emulates things it really shouldn't

It's infuriating, to say the least, when it happens. It's outright rage-inducing when you stroll straight past the final egg and take a swan dive into the ocean, killing your change to get a warp zone, bonus points (though nobody really cares about those these days) and a route to a shorter overall game to be played!

T-Rex, for when you have to eat those trying to eat you.

Despite it being only one flaw in the games make-up, it's a huge flaw and causes unnecessary deaths and failures not because of a lack of player ability but by overly strict sensitivity to changes in direction and the rate at which the code updates the inputs being read. It's a real shame because graphically the game looks very polished apart from the backgrounds, the design and depiction of the characters are impressive, especially for the NES trying to replicate a more advanced arcade game. But the control issue is unforgivable. Dying in a game or failing in a game should be because of the player's inability to solve an issue, not because the game doesn't respond.

You will want these, just to get the game over faster

Instead of being fun, it just comes across as enjoyable until it feels like the game wants you dead and to stop having fun while it horsecock slaps you at the same time just to rub salt into the wound. I should lay off the coffee after that one.

Deadlight

Dark, foreboding, foggy. This is about as bright and promising at the game is going to get.

The platformer. An often overlooked genre of gaming these days with the big budget licenses out there seemingly opting for more and more use of the First Person Shooter, or that over-the-shoulder Third Person perspective given to games like Gears of War, Silent Hill, Resident Evil 4 (and onwards). Yet the platformer seems to be running in the background along its 2D plane and gathering focus from smaller developers that are taking it into this bullshit term "2.5D" which means nothing. The games are 3D in many cases but the control is suited to the 2D plane. Games of this ilk have been made ever since Quake was adapted and modifiable into a Total Conversion. Rather fittingly, it seems, that Deadlight has taken the Unreal Engine and done the same thing.

No... I didn't make this jump as I was too focused on taking the picture. Looks nice though.

Deadlight, takes the "2.5D" (sod it, it's a platformer, let's leave it at that) and gives us a back-story, a setting and a form of play not unlike Prince of Persia (the ORIGINAL) or Limbo. You're a survivor in 1986 where there's been an outbreak of a disease that causes blackening of the whole body and bright lights to appear in your eyes, while also removing higher brain function and has the patients wandering around infecting others with bites and clubbing/clawing them to death if they won't succumb to the munchies. So yes, it's a zombie affair.

Death, incidentally Randy has the amazing ability to drown faster than most people can hold their breath, let alone choke.

We're introduced to Randy, our husky-voiced protagonist while he's blowing out someone's brains and then telling his fellow survivors to run for it before the shadowy zombies turn up. Which they do, breaking the ladder on their way out, which nicely shoehorns us into the "lone survivor searching to reunite" story through a wrecked and bashed up Seattle. Add into this the dilemma of hallucinations, bad dreams and whether or not Randy will find his wife, daughter and friends, and we've got ourselves all our motivation and reasoning for running, jumping, rolling, shooting, axing and dying through the burning backdrops of Seattle, apparently, I cannot vouch for historical accuracy or landmarks and given it's an alternative history for 1986, it pretty much gives the level designers carte blanche on creativity.

Cutscenes are shown in a very impressive "moving comic" fashion. The design and execution fitting in aptly with the overall setting of the game.

But creativity is certainly the focus. The entirety of Deadlight looks wonderful with its dark and bleak tones, the sense of gloom and despair almost so thick you can cut it with an axe. Everything looks rancid, rotten and ruined from the warehouses and homes to the sewers, subways and hospitals. There is very little that looks positive in this game and when the flashbacks happen, showing times before the end of the world has happened, the game looks overly fake. Whether this is because it's trying to ham up the 1970's view of hot apple pie on windows and every man in a suit and hat returning home saying "Hi honey, I'm home" to the 2.4 children nuclear household, is up for debate.

Another wonderful use of the 3rd dimension interacting with this plane of existence. Namely by a helicopter and machinegun trying to add to your problems.

Deadlight plays very much like Prince of Persia, Flashback and Limbo. You've your main character, he can run, jump, climb, wall-jump, duck, roll, axe, pistol and slingshot (contextual puzzles, trust me) his way out of most difficulties while also having to navigate around and over most of the enemies. It's highly unlikely you'll kill everything, in fact in some situations there are infinite enemies hiding around the corner in the background waiting for you at key points. It's an odd situation, since some of the set pieces will require you to kill 2-3 enemies, some will require you to fend them off until you can escape and others are simply that you have to outrun, out-maneouveur and outwit the shadow zombies. This can be from summoning them to you and watching them go swan-dive off a cliff, drop things on them, have them walk through electrified flooring, push them into machine-gun fire coming from the background and a whole host of other ways to dispatch them.

Brief moments of quiet are often accompanied by rather exquisite detail showing the dilapidation of the surroundings and structures.

You've got your health, which can be upgraded, your stamina which also can be upgraded but there's no puzzle in this game that requires the use of more stamina. If anything it just gives you a little extra breathing time between one awkward jump and another, they're often hidden in very out of the way places that most people wouldn't consider or stop to explore given their hidden nature. Jumps need to be made to places that don't look like they'd support Randy landing upon them, or alternative routes found in the middle of speed puzzles that require fast dexterous reflexes and reactions or they'd die before reaching the end and have to start over.

The axe. Nothing really more needs to be said.

Speaking of which, the game is fairly forgiving. Dying at any point only really puts you back barely a screen's worth unless it's one of those ongoing, lots of things to avoid, puzzles. Like running away from helicopter gunships, or escaping from a collapsing building. Speaking of which...

It's not an easy thing to navigate through but by the time you're here, you'll have mastered most of the moves and can throw it all together almost flawlessly. Though what is a shame, is the fact that you won't have much time to master everything and use it, for the game is over in around 3 or so hours. Perhaps the sign of a good game, perhaps not, but when you're seeking to enjoy a game and it leaves you wanting more, you can always replay it but there's little scope for alternative solutions to situations.

There's often a way for players to kill the Shadows by using the environment.

Herein lies the problem. It's a lovely game, there's no two ways about that, it's very well thought out and fantastically executed in showcasing a dark and foreboding environment but there are, as almost always, issues with the game itself. In particular in this case the control system. There's something counter-intuitive about the layout of the buttons that leads you using the triggers and shoulder buttons in what isn't apparent to be a sensible manner at the time and the causes of death will be simply, hitting the wrong button at the wrong time or the right button but only after you ran a self-diagnostic check on your muscles and synapses. Occasionally there is the issue that the game won't let you jump a specific direction in time and combat with the shadows can be rather hit and miss where you'll be dependent upon scoring a knock-down but find yourself running out of stamina before it falls so you can run past it.

Though in some cases it's quicker to run past them by running through and jumping.

Rooms like this are often a puzzle in themselves. Here you can fight the Shadows and run the risk of death, or use the environment to skip around them.

In some cases the game also acts rather unfairly and expects you to play via trial and improvement. Deliberately goading the player into causes a mistake to happen, punishing them with death and then handing them back the controller as if to say "Go on, try again, next time you get a slap". Not exactly the most rewarding way of playing a game, while succeeding the first time through a trap or level will leave the player feeling unsatisfied at the prospect and idea that they've rushed through and likely missed something or some such trinket and item.

"Oi dead guys!" and watch them go haplessly to their deaths.

Thankfully, the game, for the 100% completionists, will let you replay previous chapters and scenes of the story in order to gain all of the diary pages, memories for Randy's stock book and even old-style LCD video game controllers with jokes taken aimed at Monkey Punch animes, Chthulu Mythos and Guitar Hero as if done via Tiger Handheld machines. It's a cute little throwback and nod to the older days of gaming and thankfully more fun than the actual handhelds were.... Except the Turtles one, that was quite fun.

If you can see a vent or alternative route to the one you're currently on, you can pretty much guess you'll be taking it at some point

Overall a fun romp, punctuated with comic-styled cut scenes between levels and scenes, marred by gameplay hiccups, brevity and a slight dependence upon trial-and-improvement development to passing through the levels and scenes. That aside, it's certainly a game worth playing at least once all the way through, particularly if, like me, you enjoy the scopes and imagination behind apocalyptic worlds and visualisations, in all their horrid splendour.

The hazards come thick and fast, numerous too in their approach. This helicopter providing the infamous "Scrolling wall of death" following you across the rooftops.

And you get a fire axe!