Gunboat

~ GUNBOAT ~

Accolade / NEC

HuCard

1992

I'd been warned that the gameplay in this one can be pretty confusing when you first start playing it, and I was indeed tempted to shut off the game for good after just a few moments of bewilderment. But once I'd spent about fifteen minutes acclimating myself to the controls and sorting out the mission objectives, I actually started having fun with it. Piloting your boat feels good once you've got the unusual pad, button, and turbo-switch functions down, and upon achieving that level of competence, you can concentrate on completing tasks and blowing stuff up.

The one thing that can remain awkward about the action is switching from pilot's view, which you generally use when navigating the rivers, to gunner positions.

The gunners are stationed at positions apart from one another on the boat, so while you may be staring right at an enemy while you're piloting the vessel, you'll probably find yourself looking at something completely different upon changing perspectives. This can be disconcerting, as you'll need to reorient yourself in the heat of battle. Fortunately, I've found that switches are seldom required. Your bow gunner can take care of most enemies while you continue steering.

Some folks may be irritated that they essentially have to pause the game to look at their map (and they'll have to do plenty of this). I wish that the sector maps were placed on the piloting screen; many of the gauges that are there seem pretty useless while the maps are lifesavers. Still, stopping here and there to check my location didn't annoy me much.

The game is "known" (although not necessarily in a positive way) for its "polygon"-based visuals, and all in all, I think it looks pretty good, a hell of a lot better than Falcon. I really can't complain about most of the craft, vessels, and structures (though infantrymen look awful).

It's cool that many of your foes don't just "vanish" upon being annihilated; you can look around and see downed choppers and burning rubble and the like.

The designers tried to use superficial elements to establish some atmosphere: the sky turns red when enemies are on the scene, and you can hear screams as things are being hit. In truth, the screams can be rather annoying (especially at first, before you're used to them), and the game is too easy to ever really be scary, but hey, at least they made an effort with this stuff.

Actually, since the missions are easy to complete and don't really require much time, Gunboat ends up being a nice pick-up-and-play title. It lets you save your rank and kill numbers and other such stuff as a little extra incentive to return to it and continue to advance your great "career."