Ikari Warriors - Review

This mindlessly repetitive shooter was surprisingly popular in its time but it’s aged poorly and you’d be better off playing almost any other shooter than this one. Part of the reason for its popularity was its local co-op, which makes everything ten times more fun, and the difficulty of the levels requiring you to spend countless hours mastering its twitch based controls. The game is heavily inspired by franchise such as 'Rambo' and quite simply you’ll spend the game trying to survive hoards of enemies in endless, 8-bit, plains and jungles.

Developer: SNK
Genre: Arcade shooter
Release date: March 1986
Platforms: Nintendo Entertainment System, Atari ST, Amiga, Commandore 64, PC booter
ESRB: E + 10 - Everyone above 10

The game is played from a top-down perspective and the gameplay is very simple, shoot at everything that you can see and try not to die. You have a limited amount of bullets and grenades but the levels are littered with power-ups so ammunition conservation is not really your priority. Enemies will come at you from every angle so you really need to be quick on the controller to kill all of them and come out the fray unscathed. To help you along, you may commandeer vehicles such as tanks and helicopters though they are surprisingly fragile and will easily be destroyed so you can’t rely on them too much. If anything, their own real purpose is to move across the battlefield faster because movement on foot is excruciatingly slow. This wouldn’t be so much of a problem if the game didn’t rely on your fast reactions but the sluggish movements of your character mean that you simply cannot escape the lethal situations they keep putting you in. 

The game is two player and usually this would be fantastic but the levels are so agonizingly long and difficult that you’re more than likely to give up halfway through. This is the kind of game that is better off played in short bursts but it doesn’t allow for that and instead demands you and your friend to commit an incredibly long time to simply complete one, bland, repetitive level. The fact this is a game on the NES is no excuse as there are plenty of decent shooter games on these old consoles. The game is difficult in the sense that you cannot dodge, can hardly control where you’re shooting and without using a cheat code to become invincible its basically impossible to complete and, when you’re invincible, what’s even the point of playing in the first place? 

'Ikari Warriors' can be summarized as a game where you die a lot and walk forward a lot. There’s no level design because it all looks the same bar a few objects placed in your way to slow you down even more than you were already progressing. The game is full of glitches and you can very easily become stuck with no way of advancing onwards, even if you die you’ll just respawn in the same spot so your only option is to reload. There’s no plotline, no real gameplay and why it was so popular is an utter mystery to me. This is quite possibly one of the worst games I have played that has previously received good reviews.

The Good:

• I don’t have to play it if I don’t want to
• Some people like it, apparently.

The Bad:

• It’s boring
• Slow 
• Pointless 
• Impossible to complete 
• Feature-less 
• Glitchy 
• Ugly 
• With awful music 
• And even worse controls

The Score: 2/10

Final thoughts: Ugh.

By: Rambling Fox Reviews