"Battle Engulfed Terror Island." That's the subtitle here, one that makes little sense. The lead characters couldn't be more poorly designed, especially during the brief cinematics between levels. Weapons and power-ups are plentiful mostly due to the extreme difficultly. All of this is a sign of things to come.
Borrowing from countless other action games, "Gunforce" is a very basic shooter with few things to add. There are plenty of different vehicles to drive (including a helicopter and tank), but these actually make the game more difficult. Your character is always left out in the open, never inside the protective covering these vehicles should provide.
The main weapons provided to these characters are completely useless. It fires slow, has little power, and basically becomes completely ineffective come the later stages. The only high point here is that should you die with a power-up, it stays on the screen (completely reloaded) to be picked up again. In multi-player affairs, that can lead to some fighting when a friend picks up your favorite weapon.
Bosses should be menacing, a perfect cap to a stage. Here they are nothing more than some metal junk strewn together with a few guns placed in various positions. Occasionally inaccurate, the controls make it difficult to maneuver between the onslaughts of bullets hailing down upon the player. It's all highly unfair simply putting this one down with the hundreds of other quarter suckers out there.
If there is one thing going for this one it's the rather impressive graphics. Bright colors are strewn about the screen and the explosions are nothing short of spectacular. A few of the backgrounds are highly detailed, close to digitized look at a few points. It could use a few more enemies to blow away, but the action gets too intense to notice anyway.
Using some stock Hollywood screams just makes everything seem like a comedy. Every death is accompanied by one, enough to become annoying after 10 minutes of play. There's little in the way of music as very few channels are available to it. It's decent; it just never seems to keep pace with the action.
This would be ported over to the SNES where the console would struggle with it. One enemy on the screen slowed it down to a halt. As sort of an apology, "Gunforce 2" would simply blow away the crowds and that's the game you should be tracking down.
