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"Afterburner this is not..."

Games that are built around television or movies tend to have some pretty crappy outcomes and don’t follow anything that is supposed to be represented. Airwolf is one of those games that starts out with all of the best intentions to follow the story, but somehow gets lost in the need to throw obscure missions and too much shooting around. I’ve played this game several times in the last couple of weeks, and to be honest, I can see where the action is in terms of the missions that you undertake. While there isn’t much else to the game other than fly here, blow this up, fly back, there are plenty of things to shoot and explore, though there isn’t much depth to the overall game.

Anyone who remembers the television show, will remember a bad-ass helicopter that could stop and turn on a dime as well as fly at incredible speeds while destroying everything in its path. Although the television show on the whole wasn’t all that interesting and came at a time when Knight Rider and the A-Team were the rage, there was something to the actual combat. With plenty of fighting and plenty of action that revolved around drug dealers, mercenaries and the occasional international plot to rule the world, Airwolf was worth watching once in a while. The story of the game attempts to follow some of the television plots, with strafing runs on enemy installations and prisoner rescues.

Playing through Airwolf takes patience and the ability to read a crude map as well as outrun endless enemies and do so while keeping your health in the best shape. While I can say that there is plenty of fighting to be done, the overall missions that you have to complete takes quite a bit of time and patience in order to be successful. You will find that the enemies outnumber you in the ranges of thousands to one and you have to destroy incoming missiles as well as avoid radar detection. Although there are some interesting ideas in the way to go about the missions, you have to find your way through these enemy infested grounds and blast them all without getting nailed yourself.

You might think that this is easy by the way that I make it sound, but in all reality, there is nothing easy about this game, or the way that you have to take out your enemies. Airwolf is equipped with two weapons in the form of machine guns and missiles and both of these must be used in order to get anywhere in the game. The missiles automatically lock onto your enemies and will follow them wherever they go, shooting them down and taking them from your field of view. The machine guns on the other hand are instrumental in blasting the missiles that are incoming from planes flying straight at you. There is no sense in trying to outrun them as you will simply take the damage anyway.

The part of Airwolf that frosts me to the point of not liking it is the fact that you can’t get to the end of your missions without getting killed a million times. A map tries to help you with where you have to go and what you have to look for, but there is little if anything here on the map that really give you a direction on where you have to go. You might speed up to fast and totally overshoot your target, which forces you to come back and hope that you land in the right spot to the job done. Something else that I found rather aggravating falls back on the enemies and what they fire at you, because no matter what you do, you can only take out so many missiles before you’re overwhelmed.

Airwolf doesn’t have much control issue other than learning how to speed up the chopper in order to get a good cruising speed. Pressing the select button will send your chopper flying at high speeds, while the A and B buttons control either your missiles or your machine guns. Anyone should be able to pick up on the control within the first few minutes of play. Now, I’ve heard that there are some different views that you can take with the game, but I can’t find them for the life of me, so if there is a special trick to this, then I missed it. Landing on the ground requires a little practice and an easy touch to get right, but there isn’t anything special or exceptionally tough about the controls in this portion either.

The visuals of Airwolf are about as bland and as exciting as a chess game between two four hundred year me in the middle of a park during the fall. You have a decent view of your cockpit controls and while there is some detail here, the rest of the game is for naught. Your battle field is one huge green plane with things that are either flying at you, or away from you depending on what you’re doing. The incoming missiles as well are exceptionally dull and seems as though the overall visual presentation was put through a slow wash of color and bad animation before programmed onto the cart. One interesting point to the visuals though, is the scene of Airwolf taking off and landing; both of these are actually pretty cool to watch, but happen infrequently.

I’m all for the Airwolf theme song and I’m even all for it repeating nine times in a row, but when there is a seamless loop of the theme, I feel as though something has been put on repeat and can’t be taken off. If anything could annoy me more, it’s the fact that the theme never changes no matter what you’re doing or what mission you’re attempting to complete. While there is something to the sound effects, they tend to be extremely minimal and range from tin gunfire to the sound of a missile blasting off in an echo. Aside from those two things and the effect of your chopper smashing into the ground, there is nothing here worth mentioning twice.

Airwolf is probably one of the games that started the curse of crappy conversions from television and movies to video games simply based on the presentation. While the game tries to be solid in the game play department, the ideas that are here really don’t get up off the ground and you might find that it would have been better if they did. The enemies are non-stop and the controls are easy enough to figure out, but the constant battles and less actual strategy make this a third place game to air shooters such as After Burner. For those looking to collect, this is just another game to place in the stack, but for gamers looking for NES shooters, stick to something with more going for it than an aging television name.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 10/28/03