Previous Next

Your country has been taken over by the evil dictator, Baron Swindelis (are you sure about this, Richard?). You are the only hope, as usual. Your government has graced you with a fleet of three multi-million pound helicopters that make the AH-64 Apache Gunship look like a potato gun with wings. What's more, it runs on pure Pepsi Cola, which is why Pepsi have sponsored all the helicopter's take-off pads (not landing pads, there's no landings to be done here, matey).

Probably the only real way to describe the coin-op is Afterburner with a vertical scrolling section and without the mind numbingly fast scrolling. The coin-op's 3D graphics are impressive to say the least, and feature a brand new way of producing 3D images that are both realistic and manipulatable. The screen is set up as a series of planes, each one being a cutaway of a real image. When these planes are transposed onto one another, a 3D image is formed. The angle at which each plane is positioned in relation to its neighbours is governed by the laws of perspective in relation to the position of the helicopter. With me so far?

Each of the four levels in divided into three sections. The first is an overhead view, which has your helicopter flying over a 3D landscape filled with all types of enemy. The second section has you flying into the screen through the same landscape with a different perspective. The third section in each level is a fight with the mothership for that particular area, level 1 for example is a huge battleship.

The first level is a jaunt through a city centre. As you might guess, the buildings cause a bit of a problem when you're in a low level combat with tanks and helicopters but since when was realism a part of the arcade.

It's right on the first screen that the 3D effect, though used very crudely on the C64, works really well. The skyscrapers are portrayed as a series of rectangles, each one slightly bigger than the last, overlaid on the previous one. This system means that it's very simple to move around inside a 3D area. You can move your helicopter left, right, forward, backward and up and down. The same effect applies on the second level, except that the viewpoint has changed.

You have two different types of fire. You can fire a stream of bullets and launch missiles, which are far more destructive. The bullets can be fired in a continuous stream, but the missiles are a bit slower to fire. There is quite a pause between each launch of the rockets, so a bit of care is necessary when picking targets.

All this means that there should, by rights, be a lot going on in the joystick area, but the game is surprisingly simple to control. Speed can be controlled via the keyboard, but it's far easier to use the joystick. The fire button activates both weapons, i.e. the cannon automatically fires and the missiles fire if any are available. Hold down Fire and move forward and back to accelerate and decelerate, left and right to move left and right, and up and down to climb and dive.

They've crammed in all the coin-op, and that means that there's a lot of big things being moved around. For example, on the second level, you have to fly between huge pillars and try and steer through little arches that appear in huge walls. All this is very, very fast, and quite playable too.

The game plays very much like the arcade, apart from the fact it seems a lot easier. Any game that I almost complete inside of the first hour I play has to be easy - I lost all my lives fighting the end of level mutha on the last level.

As I've said, the graphics are very fast, and strangely enough, not at all confusing. The 3D update is a little crude and jerky, but it works well enough to provide a recognisable effect. All the sprites are recognisable although there's simply not enough of them. Chris Butler who programmed this, relies far too heavily on character blocks.

The sound is a bit poor, with a weak tune and very few spot effects. The whoosh effect when you take off is particularly pointless.

Thunderblade is by no means a disaster but, as is the case with Afterburner, it comes nowhere close to Operation Wolf in the gameplay stakes.