GunForce: Battle Fire Engulfed Terror Island or simply titled as GunForce, is a side-scrolling action shooting game produced by Irem for the arcades in 1991. The game was later ported by Bits Studios and published by Irem to the Super Famicom exclusively in Japan in 1992. Outside of Japan, it later received a sequel titled GunForce II, originally known in Japan as Geo Storm. The player is armed with a gun that fires rapid-fire bullets. Each direction it shoots can be fixed toward it so the player doesn't have to hold the joystick toward it. Players may find motorcycles to speed across enemy territory faster in addition to helicopters and cable cars. After scoring over any high score, whether they win or lose, players can enter their name into the high score list after the game over screen is "achieved". A strict time limit keeps the game going at a steady pace throughout; the consequence involves losing a life.
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Imagine Contra, only less cool.
No, less cool.
Still too cool.
No, even less cool than that.
Yep, now you have Gunforce. A really shitty SNES run-and-gun that scrolls like a snail, where enemies are braindead and might not even face you and were you arsenal is about 3 weapons with one unique weapon per level.
There is one saving grace to Gunforce that makes it, if not better, then at least kind of original and it's vehicles. How are they? Let's do the excercise again: imagine Metal Slug, only so uncool that it physically hurts. There.
Most of the bosses feel like the first boss from Contra on NES, and the last one even rips off the whole alien theme.
I think it has like 6 levels that all give you a 100 second time limit, so not only is the game quite easy but it's also like 15 minutes long. The enemies can only shoot into one of 8 directions, so as long as you're not on their bullet trajectory nothing can hurt you.
Just play Metal Slug or something.
No, less cool.
Still too cool.
No, even less cool than that.
Yep, now you have Gunforce. A really shitty SNES run-and-gun that scrolls like a snail, where enemies are braindead and might not even face you and were you arsenal is about 3 weapons with one unique weapon per level.
There is one saving grace to Gunforce that makes it, if not better, then at least kind of original and it's vehicles. How are they? Let's do the excercise again: imagine Metal Slug, only so uncool that it physically hurts. There.
Most of the bosses feel like the first boss from Contra on NES, and the last one even rips off the whole alien theme.
I think it has like 6 levels that all give you a 100 second time limit, so not only is the game quite easy but it's also like 15 minutes long. The enemies can only shoot into one of 8 directions, so as long as you're not on their bullet trajectory nothing can hurt you.
Just play Metal Slug or something.
Credit feeding is ok if your game has a zillion peoples to bang-bang and takes 15 minutes
Feels like a budget combination of Contra and Metal Slug. Lots of hectic side scrolling shooting action but the level transitions and final level felt a bit awkward
In my previous reviews for Blade Master and Undercover Cops I've already mentioned developers moving on from Irem to form Nazca and unleashing Metal Slug. What I held back so far was they actually did Geo Storm with Irem before and that game pretty much feels like a blueprint for the now classic Run and Gun series.
In the west though, Geo Storm was renamed Gunforce II and it was about time for me to find out if that actually means the original Gunforce is a spiritual predecessor of the Metal Slug series as well.
It is… kind of? See, the thing with this 1991 side scrolling shooter is that it's not only less comical like Geo Storm is compared to Metal Slug. Gunforce is in general more dull, which of course in a way feels natural, looking at games in retrospect.
I must admit, I'm not the world's biggest Run and Gun aficionado. I sometimes challenge myself with those hard games like Contra or Metal Slug, but I would have to put more effort in to call myself reasonably good. So without free play and continues allowed on this machine, I would have gotten nowhere.
What I can talk about after checking out Gunforce though is in most parts it did feel hard but not unfair, unlike my criticism on above mentioned Irem Beat'em'ups. With some training, especially proper handling of the diagonal shots, I might manage quite a lot of the parts until the enemies really swarm you.
That was also one of my problems with the final boss that has an increasing number of gnomes taking your attention, so you can't fire enough rounds at the actual target. For the last phases I found a sweet spot where I only had to evade occasional firing, so there might be a pattern to get through all of this.
Does this encourage me to pick up on that and truly beat the game like an honest warrior? Not quite. And that's not even because Gunforce had wacky controls, I got pretty good at them over time. But one detail I hated for instance was when the screen scrolls up, it doesn't count if there is a platform below. A gap on the recent screen means instant death.
But the major bummer is that it's so barebone in comparison. It's got the weapon upgrade system and you can use different vehicles, even tanks and a helicopter. Maybe that was more fun in 1991, but Gunforce didn't really entertain me enough with it.
I can live without the hostages, because I'm not expecting Gunforce to be identical to later games in that lineage, but the enemy and level design don't offer much variation and the bosses are very pragmatic, not to say uninspired.
Maybe at a point when you're really looking for another genre title to 1cc, then Gunforce might come up, but other than that, I don't see much sense in putting coins into this cabinet for more than historical curiosity, which is maybe why it's not very prominent in the wild anymore.
The sad truth is, that Gunforce might not even be bad, but with the exciting Geo Storm or Metal Slug available for example, there's just no real demand for it. If your arcade has it, and you're done with their eclectic selection so far, yeah, then go for Gunforce, because we always need new old games to play. Same probably goes for the announced five volumes of an Irem Collection.
In the west though, Geo Storm was renamed Gunforce II and it was about time for me to find out if that actually means the original Gunforce is a spiritual predecessor of the Metal Slug series as well.
It is… kind of? See, the thing with this 1991 side scrolling shooter is that it's not only less comical like Geo Storm is compared to Metal Slug. Gunforce is in general more dull, which of course in a way feels natural, looking at games in retrospect.
I must admit, I'm not the world's biggest Run and Gun aficionado. I sometimes challenge myself with those hard games like Contra or Metal Slug, but I would have to put more effort in to call myself reasonably good. So without free play and continues allowed on this machine, I would have gotten nowhere.
What I can talk about after checking out Gunforce though is in most parts it did feel hard but not unfair, unlike my criticism on above mentioned Irem Beat'em'ups. With some training, especially proper handling of the diagonal shots, I might manage quite a lot of the parts until the enemies really swarm you.
That was also one of my problems with the final boss that has an increasing number of gnomes taking your attention, so you can't fire enough rounds at the actual target. For the last phases I found a sweet spot where I only had to evade occasional firing, so there might be a pattern to get through all of this.
Does this encourage me to pick up on that and truly beat the game like an honest warrior? Not quite. And that's not even because Gunforce had wacky controls, I got pretty good at them over time. But one detail I hated for instance was when the screen scrolls up, it doesn't count if there is a platform below. A gap on the recent screen means instant death.
But the major bummer is that it's so barebone in comparison. It's got the weapon upgrade system and you can use different vehicles, even tanks and a helicopter. Maybe that was more fun in 1991, but Gunforce didn't really entertain me enough with it.
I can live without the hostages, because I'm not expecting Gunforce to be identical to later games in that lineage, but the enemy and level design don't offer much variation and the bosses are very pragmatic, not to say uninspired.
Maybe at a point when you're really looking for another genre title to 1cc, then Gunforce might come up, but other than that, I don't see much sense in putting coins into this cabinet for more than historical curiosity, which is maybe why it's not very prominent in the wild anymore.
The sad truth is, that Gunforce might not even be bad, but with the exciting Geo Storm or Metal Slug available for example, there's just no real demand for it. If your arcade has it, and you're done with their eclectic selection so far, yeah, then go for Gunforce, because we always need new old games to play. Same probably goes for the announced five volumes of an Irem Collection.
Gunforce on SNES is a laughably bad arcade port. It's a really, really poor run n' gun, far worse than you'd typically expect from the genre. The controls are sluggish, the animation is super sloppy at times, and the screen scrolls way too slow and ends up with like an autoscrolling feel to it because you're constantly on the edge of the screen. This is an issue because it always ends up putting you too close to newly spawned enemies who make quick work of you, and it doesn't help that if you're within a certain distance of them you actually can't shoot them. At least the death sound is really funny, but it starts to get grating as you progress. Probably the best thing about this is that it's less than 30 minutes long, honestly.
This port was released the same year as Contra III. Nine months later, even. I checked who developed it to see what the fuck went wrong, and it turns out it was Bits Studios. You know what else they made?
This port was released the same year as Contra III. Nine months later, even. I checked who developed it to see what the fuck went wrong, and it turns out it was Bits Studios. You know what else they made?