Fire Force is a 1992 action game, a refreshing addition in the world of 2D side-scrolling games and quite a strong effort. Although its average graphics and sound, it took the military games a few steps further by adding some strategy. The game was released only for the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST home computers.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY You are a redneck warrior (much like Rambo) and you have twelve missions (in different territories like the jungle, the urban places, the desert etc) to choose from and accomplish, including the assassination of a Middle East Officer, the destruction of ground-to-air missile pods and the demolition of a bridge in a tropical war zone (and more). You equip yourself with a few weapons such as the M-16 and AK-47 rifles or the M-60 machine gun, rocket launchers, grenades, explosives and so on. At the beginning of each mission, a helicopter is deploying you in the "hot" area and you have a certain amount of time to complete your mission and reach the extraction point alive. If you fail to your rendez-vous with the chopper, the game will be over and you will be automatically tagged as M.I.A. by the government! Apart from shooting anything that stands in your way, you've got to plan your moves and think of what to do before engaging in the mission! The game offers some nice gameplay elements which are painfully realistic and particularly violent. You can cut an enemy's throat in cold blood or shoot soldiers directly in the face! You can also infiltrate war-torn buildings investigating for targets (i.e. when looking for hidden missiles to destroy) but you must always be alerted for explosive boobie-traps in every room. The ammunition is limited but you can find a few magazines scattered around each level, as well as some healing potions and grenades. Use them wisely! The only cons is the tricky way to fire your rifle in different angles and switch between your weapons, which always seems to take a split-second longer than an enemy needs to pull out his gun and blast you! Overall, the game's pace is intense and this game is a damn good action game title!
GRAPHICS / SOUND Ok, the graphics on the Amiga are nice but not something to amaze the player. Everything is nicely drawn without any eye-catching backdrops, large color-palettes or parallax-scrolling. The sprites look great though and they move fast and smooth. Compared to the ST version, the main details and colors are the same, but the game plays a bit faster and smoother on the Amiga. The game's sound offers a few nicely done sampled gunshots, bangs and screams.
CPU: Motorola MC68000 7.16 MHz MEMORY: 512KB of Chip RAM (OCS chipset - A500), 512 KB of Slow RAM or Trapdoor RAM can be added via the trapdoor expansion, up to 8 MB of Fast RAM or a Hard drive can be added via the side expansion slot. The ECS chipset (A500+) offered 1MB on board to 2MB (extended) of Chip RAM. GRAPHICS: The OCS chipset (Amiga 500) features planar graphics (codename Denise custom chip), with up to 5 bit-planes (4 in hires), allowing 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32 color screens, from a 12bit RGB palette of 4096 colors. Resolutions varied from 320x256 (PAL, non-interlaced, up to 4096 colors) to 640x512 (interlace, up to 4 colors). Two special graphics modes where also included: Extra Half Bright with 64 colors and HAM with all 4096 colors on-screen. The ECS chipset models (Amiga 500+) offered same features but also extra high resolution screens up to 1280x512 pixels (4 colors at once). SOUND: (Paula) 4 hardware-mixed channels of 8-bit sound at up to 28 kHz. The hardware channels had independent volumes (65 levels) and sampling rates, and mixed down to two fully left and fully right stereo outputs