After Burner Climax Review
PROS
- Provides enough optional 'helpers' to enhance the experience for a casual audience; players get to choose how brutal the challenge is.
- Plenty of alternative routes, missions, and even Score Attack to keep fans busy beyond the basic Arcade mode.
CONS
- Generally poorly suited to smaller screens; as it is, spotting planes can be hard... squinting to even make out the red triangles is problematic.
- Chaotic gameplay quickly wears out its welcome.
VERDICT
After Burner Climax is to gaming, what giant piles of random bits of candy are to desert; they both provide a short burst of joy and can be ever so sweet, but without more structure it quickly loses its flavor.
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I'll readily admit that I have next to no idea what I'm doing when I play After Burner. In just about every instance I've simply done the best I can and never sweated the details. After Burner Climax was designed to punish such 'casual' mindsets - it was, after all, an Arcade title - but the iOS release has a leniency to it that actually makes the chaos more of an amusing distraction than a brutal smokescreen for the unrelenting enemy.
Whether you jump in with the touch or tilt based controls, the feel of the game is decidedly twitchy. Swing back and forth and you'll perform a barrel-roll, avoiding some of the incoming fire and enemies pinning you down from behind; activate 'Climax' mode and you'll decimate the enemy in a shower of missiles.
Initially the game presents a very vanilla, straight-from-Arcade port of its game and for many that will be enough. It's challenging, it's high-impact and surviving until the end feels genuinely rewarding as you'll have survived massive hit-squads and death-defying tunnel chases to get there. However if you're like me you'll appreciate the 'cheats' that unlock as you progress through the game.
They're not actually cheats though, but increasing the amount of credits on offer; engaging auto-fire; making the aiming reticule larger; these are all things that amount to crippling the game's difficulty curve so you can at least hang in there until the end.
However, the game's chaotic nature eventually takes its toll and unless you're a deft hand at spotting pin-prick sized clusters of pixels that announce incoming planes, you'll eventually get tired of what's on offer.
That's not to say the game is ugly either - it does its best to bring the Arcade title to a mobile device, but the tiny screen does nothing to help when it comes to precise and intuitive aiming.
If After Burner has always been one of your favorites, there's nothing wrong with checking this title out - however if you need your games to be a bit more structured, you might want to look elsewhere.
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