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Air Fortress is one of those kinds of
games that tries to be so many things all at once. Many games that attempt
doing this often end up falling short in some areas, because there is not
enough focus on any one aspect to make it great. Air Fortress is no
exception to this. While it is not a bad game, and it has quite a few
interesting concepts and features, the sum of its parts doesn't quite
equal a great gaming experience on the whole.
GRAPHICS:
4/10I was
very disappointed by this game's graphics. They are not entirely bad for an 8-bit
game, but they could have been better. First of all, your little man and
the enemies are very nondescript and monochrome. Due to the lack of color and detail, most of them look one-dimensional. The same few enemies
appear over and over again, sometimes with palette swapping. The
best-looking parts of the game are the space sequences where you fly your
space sled over the surface of the fortresses. Some of the graphics here
do look quite nice, such as the eerie background fog, and the spinning origami enemies. But the
graphics for inside the fortresses are just plain terrible. The
backgrounds usually consist of a simple tiled pattern, whose color
clashes with the silvery-gray foreground. And even though there are different
background colors and patterns in each fortress, the levels still all look alike. Although this game was
actually made in 1987, there were still a number of games, even by that year, that looked lightyears better than this (Castlevania being one good example.)
 ...
SOUND:
3/10Plain and simple, this game's sound is
annoying. It seems like they were really trying, but the results
just weren't that great. There's basically the same music in every level.
There's one theme while flying through space,
another when you're in the fortress, then it changes when you beat the
core, and then there's some songs that play during the cinemas. For the
most part, it sounds very "gung-ho", until you blow up the core, then it
becomes dark and eerie. The music loops after every few notes, and is quite irritating. The sound effects are typical bleeps, bloops, and explosions.
CONTROL:
6.5/10Many aspects of this game's play control bother me. In the
space areas, it's easy to move your space sled around the screen and
shoot, but you can only fire one shot at a time, and the sled feels a bit sluggish. It's comparable to playing Gradius without picking up any speed-ups. You have to learn to compensate for this, which isn't all that bad, but it's not very fun, either. In the fortresses,
control is different, since you control your spaceman without the sled. The
gravity in the fortress is light, so you can float all around the screen.
Moving around is easy, but the spaceman is almost as sluggish as the sled. When you fire your
weapon, there is a recoil effect that causes you to slide backwards a
little bit. At first, I thought this control was great. But
as I progressed into the later fortresses, I started wishing that the spaceman could move around a little quicker, since more and more enemies were
on the screen, chasing me and shooting at me.
 ...
STORY/ATMOSPHERE:
3/10The story of Air Fortress is basically the same as most space shooters. An armada of hostile
space fortresses has appeared out of nowhere, and are destroying all
planets they come across. They are headed straight to the planet Farmel,
and it's up to one man, Hal Bailman, to stop them. The story isn't
original, but the way it's executed is different from other shooters.
Instead of just flying through stage after stage of enemies, you actually
have to go into the fortresses, find the core, and blow it up. Then you
must escape on your space sled before the fortress explodes. There's a
little cinema that shows Hal escaping on his space sled each time you
complete a fortress, but it's the same every time. Air Fortress's overall design is so nondescript, that it's devoid of practically any atmosphere.
CHALLENGE:
6.5/10Air Fortress starts out easy enough. I
beat the first three fortresses on my first try, without even dying. But
it gets more challenging the farther you progress. Unfortunately, the
challenge is not always that engaging. You fight the same few enemies over
and over again in each fortress. As you progress, there will be
more of them, and especially more of the kind that are harder to beat,
which makes it hard to keep from taking hits because of the slow speed of
the spaceman. The fortresses also become bigger and more confusing later
in the game, and it can be a real challenge just finding the core. Once
you've found the core and blown it up, you then have to find the escape
pod before the fortress blows sky high. This can also be quite
difficult! Unfortunately, none of this is really executed too well. I
don't think stockloading more and more of the same kinds of enemies in
rooms is an acceptable way of making a game more challenging. I would have
preferred more creative obstacles in the fortresses, and maybe some
bosses. (The cores aren't really bosses, since they do not attack.) The
space scenes can be challenging at first, but once you learn the enemy
patterns, and the layout of the level, they really aren't too hard. Once
you beat the game, there is a more challenging second quest,
too.
FUN:
4/10Many people have said they really love this
game, and I can agree that it was an interesting concept. I, however, did not find
it to be all that much fun to play. The space shooter scenes are extremely
simplistic, and fall well below the standards of just about every other NES shooter I've played. Floating around in zero
gravity in the fortresses is very fun at first, but the novelty wears off
after awhile. The gameplay also becomes somewhat redundant. I felt like I
was doing the exact same thing over and over again, only the fortress got
bigger and filled with more enemies. More creative level design in the
fortresses would have helped, immensely. Air Fortress borrows many of its gameplay elements from Capcom's NES version of Section-Z, but it does not come close to being as good as that game is.
 ...
At first, I thought Air Fortress would be a good game. The idea of a shooter/maze hybrid where you get to float around in zero gravity was interesting enough, but just not executed too well. Because I did not enjoy the first quest much at all, I have no motivation to finish the second quest. NES collectors may be interested in getting this game, despite my low opinion, because it is kind of quirky and different, and not completely unplayable. But if you really
want a game like this, Section-Z would be more worth your time.
OVERALL
SCORE (not an average): 4/10
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