In Gain Ground, players control one of a set of characters at a time. There are twenty characters, each with different weapons. To beat a level, players must reach the exit point with at least one character or destroy all enemies on the level before time runs out. Littered across the level are captive characters, which can be rescued by walking over, then escorting the controlled character to the exit point. If a player controlled character is killed, that character turns into a captive, except that they will disappear if the next active player controlled character dies, exits the level without them, or the player has no characters left in their party. The game is over when all controlled characters in the party are killed without any reaching the exit. However, there are three continues which allow a player to restart the level with their original three characters. There are 40 levels in the arcade version of the game. The Master System and the Genesis/Mega Drive have 50 levels in the game.


Reviews View More

This was a favorite of mine on the PS2 Genesis Collection when I was a kid, but I could never beat it. I'd even gotten good enough at it to get to the final boss without losing a single life, but I could just never beat that bugger. For this month's TR of returning to games you gave up on previously, I played this on my PS3 Genesis Collection and was finally able to put that lousy final boss in the ground (and on my first try, no less ^w^)! I already knew I could get to the end of the game with all the characters before, so that wasn't important to me (I used save states after levels to help me get to the final boss as stacked as possible X3). What I wanted to do was beat the final boss without save states, and that ended up being mission accomplished ^w^. It took me a couple hours to finish the game on my PS3.

Gain Ground takes place in the far flung future where humanity is so peaceful that the world government built a big simulation called Gain Ground to help people keep their fighting spirit. But one day, the super computer goes berserk and takes a bunch of citizens hostage, so it's up to three of humanity's bravest soldiers to go in and rescue everyone and shut down this rouge machine. I actually never really realized the game even had a story as a kid. The first time I learned about the story was when I was playing through the Gain Ground level in Project X Zone many years after the fact, and I had to look up the plot synopsis for this story bit here XD. That said, the plot isn't totally meaningless, as it leads into one of the most interesting bits of the game's design.

Gain Ground is a top-down action game with 50 screens (in a very old-school arcade style). No scrolling levels here. Just a mission you need to either get all your soldiers to the EXIT of or kill all the enemies within. The nature of it being a simulation lends to the game's fairly unconventional system of lives. You don't really have extra lives, but instead have different soldiers (20 different kinds in total, with several copies of each in the game too), and when they're dead, you can't use them anymore. Except that you can! You only start the game with 3 soldiers, but little captured soldiers appear in predesignated places in each level, and if you touch one you can drag it to the exit to have it playable in the next level. You can only drag one at a time though, so sometimes you will need to use several characters who can both get to the POW they gotta rescue AND to the exit, which can be tricky in some maps, since the level ends if you kill everything. You MUST get the POW to the exit to have them in the next stage, but that also goes for characters who "die". If a character takes a hit, they turn into a little POW token that can be rescued. Granted, if someone who is rescuing dies, the POW they were rescuing is erased and they become a POW to rescue. You don't have infinite chances, but it's very refreshingly forgiving for a game from 1990.

The characters themselves are all very different, albeit not balanced all that well. They all have a standard fire, which can shoot any direction and is often quite short range, but then everyone has their own special fire as well. Sometimes it can shoot in any direction, sometimes it gives you range across the entire screen, sometimes it can fire onto an upper level (a very very valuable skill, as many enemies hide on roofs safe from your normal bullets and most characters' special attacks), and sometimes they even take the form of a sort of shield of bullets. All the characters also have varying walk speeds and even different hands they hold their weapon in, meaning firing JUST around a corner with your default weapon may be easier with some characters than others depending on if they use their right or left hand. There's a lot of trial and error in figuring out exactly what each character can do and how good they are (but that's what save states are for XD), but it means that you need to constantly reassess how you're going to approach a stage if one of your MVPs gets taken down and has to be rescued. There are a couple characters who are like WAY better than most others (like the yellow bearded viking guy) as they have upwards-firing specials and area also very fast with good range, but well balanced or not, you'll need those soldiers if you wanna have a chance at seeing the end of the game.

The game's presentation is pretty underwhelming, as one might expect from an arcade conversion fairly early in the Genesis' life. There aren't many songs and those that are here are pretty forgettable background noise for the most part, but they aren't actively bad. The graphics are quite nice though, with the character portraits being nicely detailed, and the bullets and sprites always being very clear so there's very rarely any ambiguity for what killed you.

Verdict: Recommended. I'll admit a decent portion of it is nostalgia coupled with this being a sort of action game that fits my style very well, but this is one of my favorite Genesis games. It's not terribly long (and it's quite an expensive game if you're hunting down the physical cart), but it's really good fun. The gameplay won't be for everyone, but it's well worth a try if you have one of the many Genesis collections its found its way onto over the years.

A strange little strategy game for the Mega Drive, which I played on the PSP. Unfortunately, I never finished it, as the game made me run into a few walls as a teenager that I couldn't overcome. The difficulty was a bit unbalanced at times, some missions were very very easy while others were incredibly difficult. I used to play a round every now and then and had fun. It was very slow, but felt consistently motivating and tactically challenging. Maybe I should pick it up again.

Gain Ground is a very unusual game, that can be hard to really understand if you don't know what you're getting yourself into. However, once you understand how it works, and the design philosophy going into it, I think it actually becomes a pretty fascinating experience. I feel like the simplest way to describe this, is that it takes the design philosophy of a strategy game like Fire Emblem, and melds that into the context of a run-and-gun shooter.

I like this quite a bit, but at times I do find it a little bit bullshit in its design. It does demand a lot of patience from the player, but if you can deal with it, you will find a surprisingly rewarding experience. The Rambo and viking guys are the best units, by far.

Very fun co-op game. Would rank higher but too short. Probably don't bother if not doing co-op.

Game is very imbalanced character wise but that is part of the fun.

Cleared on July 12th, 2023 (SEGA Genesis Challenge: 27/160)

Can't say I enjoyed the game, to be honest. My biggest culprit is just the sluggish movement which makes it difficult to avoid attacks. Perhaps it's by design to add to the difficulty, but I've used the rewind feature, and I can feel the hitbox to be off, and sometimes it's not "almost impossible" to avoid, it is just straight up impossible to avoid and some characters are even slower than others.

So you have an array of characters to rescue and choose from. You start with three unnamed heroes. Dude with a gun, girl with a gun, and dude with a spear. Along the way you rescue a couple of heroes each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Some will be slow with having excellent range while others are about as fast as the game will let it be but at the cost of being unable to hit airborne enemies. When the hero you choose is unable to clear out any enemies, they can head for the "exit" and you can tag in another hero. Supposedly they act like lives which means you will need to conserve them in order to have an easy time. You either need at least one hero at the exit or to clear out every enemy in the room to advance to the next level.

There are a few good characters, some mediocre, and some too situational. There is this one guy who's special only hits enemies on high ground which is great if that's all that's left, but for ground enemies, yeah he can hit them with his normal attacks, but he is super slow. There's another guy that's similar, but only hits low ground enemies. And just the act of picking the wrong hero in the wrong level can be enough to ensure their defeat. Personally, I think the best character in the game is the gold beard viking with the bow and arrow. He has good range, he has decent damage and movement speed, and just really consistent. The only real case where I'd say he's not that good is the final boss, and to be fair, it's an extremely miserable fight with missiles that just home in on you, but you can barely dodge it because you're turbo slow as hell.

Like all Arcade games, it is designed to just frustrate you and suck away at your coins. Well, it might not have got any of that out of me, but it sure did suck away my brain cells from boredom.