Gameplay involves being the pilot of an Apache Helicopter, and shooting enemies down in the style of a vertical scrolling shooter. Large red gunships can be shot down to gain power-ups for the helicopter in order to upgrade the guns and have it fire homing missiles. Each level features a midboss and a boss, and both must be destroyed in order to advance to the next level. The style of the levels as the player advances alternates between "Shooting Mode" and "Exploration Mode," where the latter involves levels set in a fantasy-like setting and are the only level types that provide no power-ups to the player and give the player the ability to switch their altitude.
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A couple friends and I (hi vis! hi terri!) are in talks of making lists ranking each of the SNES shmup titles, and I thought it'd be funny to replay this one early on because I didn't really remember it. It was funny for a few minutes, but by the end I just felt hollow.
D-Force was released at the tail end of 1991 and is one of many early SNES titles to make great emphasis on Mode 7, being used here to alternate between two planes flying high and low. Sometimes this is optional (with use of the shoulder buttons), sometimes it happens automatically, but it never really proves itself particularly novel or useful. The music is pleasant enough for the first three stages before falling off in the second half, occasionally just turning into worse renditions of more well known songs such as La Marseillaise or the theme from E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial.
That's about it for "positives", really. Take those out of the picture and you have a one-button game that is probably one of the weakest, limpest shmups to be put on store shelves. The graphics and colors are really ugly and everything is horribly pixelated, especially when zooming in as mentioned earlier. Enemy and boss bullets are constantly blending in with your own bullets, and rarely do they make any sense with said enemies' bizarre trajectories and other jittery movements. Some of their bullets (especially in the final stage), if they fire diagonally or vertically, are much faster than their own horizontal bullets, vomiting a nonsensical mess of orange pellets at varying speeds all over the screen. The wildly inconsistent framerate gives off the feeling that the game is constantly threatening to collapse in on itself if more than two or three sprites are on screen. The bosses either just sit in place and do absolutely nothing or hide around in the corners or other places deemed inconvenient by your own terrible hitbox.
What a mess. If you saw a few seconds of this in passing, you'd probably be forgiven for assuming it was a demo or prototype. The only lesson I learned from D-Force was that I wasn't hard enough on it when I first played it in 2022. I'm sure it'll sit quite comfortably at the bottom of the shmup rankings list if I do get around to that.
By the way, check out this ill-advised excerpt from the back of the box:
"You've got the fastest bird to be had, but we're not sure you can handle it. If you're quick enough, you'll command the latest Nuclear Apache Helicopter, D-Force, through 7 bone-crushing levels. You'll roam six countries on you seemingly endless search for a powerful oil-rich Mid-Eastern Dictator. If you fail, we'll all be learning a new language soon! Comprendé?"
Not great, huh? Not quite as bad as Total Carnage about this kind of thing, but not great.
D-Force was released at the tail end of 1991 and is one of many early SNES titles to make great emphasis on Mode 7, being used here to alternate between two planes flying high and low. Sometimes this is optional (with use of the shoulder buttons), sometimes it happens automatically, but it never really proves itself particularly novel or useful. The music is pleasant enough for the first three stages before falling off in the second half, occasionally just turning into worse renditions of more well known songs such as La Marseillaise or the theme from E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial.
That's about it for "positives", really. Take those out of the picture and you have a one-button game that is probably one of the weakest, limpest shmups to be put on store shelves. The graphics and colors are really ugly and everything is horribly pixelated, especially when zooming in as mentioned earlier. Enemy and boss bullets are constantly blending in with your own bullets, and rarely do they make any sense with said enemies' bizarre trajectories and other jittery movements. Some of their bullets (especially in the final stage), if they fire diagonally or vertically, are much faster than their own horizontal bullets, vomiting a nonsensical mess of orange pellets at varying speeds all over the screen. The wildly inconsistent framerate gives off the feeling that the game is constantly threatening to collapse in on itself if more than two or three sprites are on screen. The bosses either just sit in place and do absolutely nothing or hide around in the corners or other places deemed inconvenient by your own terrible hitbox.
What a mess. If you saw a few seconds of this in passing, you'd probably be forgiven for assuming it was a demo or prototype. The only lesson I learned from D-Force was that I wasn't hard enough on it when I first played it in 2022. I'm sure it'll sit quite comfortably at the bottom of the shmup rankings list if I do get around to that.
By the way, check out this ill-advised excerpt from the back of the box:
"You've got the fastest bird to be had, but we're not sure you can handle it. If you're quick enough, you'll command the latest Nuclear Apache Helicopter, D-Force, through 7 bone-crushing levels. You'll roam six countries on you seemingly endless search for a powerful oil-rich Mid-Eastern Dictator. If you fail, we'll all be learning a new language soon! Comprendé?"
Not great, huh? Not quite as bad as Total Carnage about this kind of thing, but not great.
It's kinda bad. Has this like, bootleg feel to it, what with the ugliness, how barebones it is compared to other shmups at the time, and also the music selections, which include the Russian anthem, the French anthem, and the uh, E.T. theme.