Ikari Warriors

STORY / GAMEPLAY
During a special-ops mission, your plane crashes in a jungle many miles away from your headquarters and this hostile jungle is your starting point of action! You can play the game alone by choosing one of the two available commandos (Ralf or Clark) and there is also the option to play the game with a friend in a 2-players mode. Your main mission is to shoot your way to the Ikari Village and destroy the enemy forces (which vary among soldiers, tanks, cannons and more). Your main weapon is a machine gun and you also carry a limited supply of hand grenades that, thankfully, can be restored by destroying enemy buildings and barracks. Additionally, the game offers the opportunity to ride a battle tank and bomb everything on sight. Your tank is immune to bullets but vulnerable to mines and cannons. This means that you must immediately abandon it once it's badly damaged. In that case, the tank will start to warn you by flashing and you have 3 seconds -or so- to get out and go away from it, otherwise you'll be killed by the explosion. The fuel is limited but you can replenish it with extra gallons found along your way. Ikari Warriors is a unique arcade shooter for its time and many similar games that followed were actually based on its formula. It was SNK's attempt to "out-gun" Capcom's great Commando arcade game, a title that plays the same way but lacks some features like the use of a Tank.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The Amiga conversion is quite good, including most of the original stage details as well as the intro sequence with your plane crashing into the jungle. But it seems that the game looks like a direct port from the ST and thus it runs in 16 colors. The sprites' animation is fine and the screen scrolling is smooth (in contrast to the ST conversion that occasionally suffers from framerate issues). This is a 1987 game and surely the programmers apparently did not use the full potential of the 16bit home computers (Amiga, ST) so technically the game's graphics mostly look like a nice 8bit conversion. The sound on the Amiga does offer sampled data and consists of the original music and sound effects including gunfire, explosions and mine alert sounds during gameplay.