HyperForce by Songbird/Visual Impact
Developer: Visual Impact
Players: 1
Levels: 20
Genre: 2D action
Format: Cart
It's just you, your gun, and a corporate army bent on your destruction.
Trans Con is decimating world after world in search of enough
resources and wealth to launch an attack against the Terran High Command. The politicians don't want a direct confrontation that might hurt their corporate sponsors. So, the Interstellar Special Forces has been called in to send a lone warrior to eliminate the Trans Con threat. Wanna guess who the warrior is?
Hyper Force: It once was lost, but now is found. I'm really glad it was found too. It is the best 2D game the Jaguar has. Really. It makes you wonder how things like Bubsy happened.
Hyper Force is a 2D action game that is well-paced and fun to play. I was really impressed when I first started to play it (my friends were too), and it makes you wonder why games like this aren't made these days.
The graphics are really cool. Very large sprites, smooth animations, nice color all add to the experience. We knew the Jag could do this, and it does well. The levels are small at first, but they do tend to grow in size, but it sometimes depends on how much you want to explore. As I found out early on, there are loads of secret areas in the game. Some places youi have to find by shooting around and you'll hear a wall break. There are many breakable walls in this game. But you will usually find huge stashes of money, health, and points waiting for you within hidden areas. There are also several enemies in the game which are good enough to give you a challenge. Although, I've come to find that obstacles, such as the floating metal balls or flame shooters seem to be more of a headache than anything else.
The sound of this game is so incredible! You don't have to turn your TV up very much to hear this. The bass is quite good, giving you very satisfying explosions(which look cool by the way). The music track is just so cool, Tempest quality easily. It is sort of a soft-techno style that fits perfectly in the game.
Control is alright, and even though you can't change it, it works out nicely.
I'm adding this in since it's not in the manual. Here's a cool part of the game: you collect money to buy stuff from the shop in-between levels. There are five guns, your basic one, and then four others which seem to do the same thing, different look. All of them spread, and they seem to do the same damage. You can buy extra ammo for them or your basic gun(lower left of the screen). On the lower row of the shop screen second one from the left is an extra guy, then next to that is full health. Hope that helps someone out there.
I am almost finished with the game, I've played it quite a lot as it is very fun. And that's the best part of the game, it being fun. I'm going to skip the ratings this time due to time, but I'd give it high ratings, it was well worth my $75. Many thanks to the people which brought us this spectacular game, mainly Carl Forhan and the guys of Visual Impact. This game proves that the Jag was a superior 2D system, and it also keeps the gameplay there too. I've said it beofre, but it's nice to play something like this in a world full of 3D clones. We need more 2D games, they could be done extremely well today.
By Adam Pratt