A highly derivative yet breezy and enjoyable amalgamation of various gameplay modes that were well-trodden in the NES era. Your main fix is 2-D action platforming and amusingly nonsensical cutscenes lifted straight from the Ninja Gaiden collection (mercifully, this game never quite reaches the ball-breaking level of difficulty seen in that series). Along the way the developers serve up a few brief interludes of visually chaotic but mechanically simple overhead driving and light gun arcade-style first person shooting.

There's not an inkling of depth or originality to any of this, but the liberal borrowing from more pioneering titles undeniably works in the game's favor - you may have seen it all before, but that doesn't make it any less fun in the hands. Add in the fact that the pixel art and backgrounds here look significantly better than in nearly all of its antecedents, and you have a decent way to kill 90 minutes.

Probably the best of the rest in terms of the sample of NES games I’ve played. It has the cinematic cutscenes of Ninja Gaiden and plays much like it during the side scroller segments.

There are also other gameplay segments, there’s an overhead racer/shooter perspective. You’re basically viewing your car from a bird’s eye viewpoint shooting down other cars and enemies.

There’s also one or two arcade shooting segments.

It’s sorta crazy how much they managed to fit into a cartridge, the difficulty is also sort of manageable. There are health pick-ups and they’re almost sort of frequent. Death does mean loss of a majority of your sub weapons, leaving you with only so many grenades or gun ammo at your disposal and the blade isn’t all that great.

The hardest aspect of the game is the bosses who require almost hypnotic rote memorisation to beat.

Luckily there is no timer, I would learn the enemy tactic and then prioritise avoiding fire while letting off one or two projectiles here or there.

Storyline is sorta crazy; I’d expect it takes a play or two to fully understand it. But yeah, easily an A+ NES game with anything Nintendo, Konami or Capcom produces.

Fun side scrolling action game. Like Ninja Gaiden in some ways, the same kind of cutscenes but more over the top and the game has less cheap deaths (getting knocked back when hit isn't as bad and enemies don't respawn constantly). A run while crouching animation was a great addition. Varied enemies. Fight with a whip (that is more like a sword), gun, and grenades. Two driving segments and two rail shooter segments change things up for a little while. Sound and sprite art isn't bad but nothing great.

The English translation is hilariously bad, enough that it's probably better that way but there is a more accurate translation patch.

(This is the 39th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

Vice: Project Doom is definitely one of the best named games I've played so far. Is it one of the best games games though? Well, not really. It does some things really, really well, it has a lot more storytelling than you would expect from NES titles, but it is a game that shares similarities with many, many other games out there and other games have done many things better than this one.

This game released on April 26, 1991 for NES in Japan and NA, and got a release on Nintendo Switch Online in August 2019.

____________

STORY(TELLING)/CHARACTERS | 6/10
You play Detective Hart, to is tasked with investigating the "BEDA corporation", a front run by alien beings living on Earth in secrecy. They've developed a substance that was supposed to be food for the Aliens, however has been misused by humans due to its addictive natures, despite the fact that it has very bad side-effects.

Usually I would mention how the story resolves because for the vast majority of games, the plot and the storytelling in particular are afterthoughts. Not here. Vice: Project of Doom stands out in its storytelling and the sheer volume of its cutscenes. If I had to give a comparison, I think the Ninja Gaiden series fits best. After every stage, a cutscene plays with shots of the characters and lines of dialogue below. The camera pans left to right during these and the characters remain still otherwise, but this is very much unusual for this time and the #1 factor in which this game stands out.

There are some twists and turns in the story as well. That said, the storytelling isn't that great, probably because devs back then were game devs first and storytellers like sixteenth, so they're excused but the effort is there.

GAMEPLAY | 12/20
There are 3 types of stages in this game. In the first kind, you drive a car through a narrow driving lane and have to move side to side to avoid the edges, to avoid obstacles in front of you that damage you, and destroy/avoid enemy vehicles. This is not that great and there are only two short levels of this kind.

The second type is a side scrolling rail shooter kind of stage that repeats twice as well. You shoot enemies, some close by, some far away, before they shoot you. You pick up items they drop by moving the cursor above the items. You have a few different weapons you can use, some of which have higher AoE damage. It's OK and a nice-to-have change of pace, but I wouldn't say these levels are good. They're tolerable at best.

The third type, finally, is the main kind, 2D platforming with enemies everywhere. You have three weapons at your disposal, two of which need ammo (dynamite, gun). You also have a sword that you can slash your way through levels with. I mostly stuck with the sword. The timing window with your sword is not that long, so I often would be just early or just too late and get hit. It doesn't help that at many points, there are a lot of enemies coming from both angles. Some drop into view out of nowhere sometimes and immediately start shooting, which makes avoiding their shots impossible unless you move forward a step at a time, which would kill the pace and therefore your enjoyment of the game. So just eat those hits and keep moving.

At the end of each level, a meat item drops which regenerates most of your health, so getting hit a bunch of times is not a big issue. So yes, this is not a "one-hit and you die" type of game, thankfully. But it's not a very original game either, at least in terms of its gameplay. In fact, it's very average.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 8/10
No voice acting. Sound design is typical for NES games, so it doesn't stand out. The soundtrack is definitely one of the better ones of all NES games I've played so far, and has some bangers, including the track they've used for many of the cutscenes. The track for Boss Battles 3-2 and 7-3 is also worth a listen.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 4/10
It's very average graphically. It's an NES game, so it's inferior to some of the other games that came out at the time due to the move to 16-bit across the board. Artistically, it still has the ability to stand out but it doesn't. The levels and their artistic design are unimpressive and the kind of enemies that the devs have thrown into each level appears kinda random. You gut red ninjas flying out of the ground, fish too whilst bats come down from above, it just does not feel very thought out in that regard.

ATMOSPHERE | 6/10
The game is described as biopunk and noir. That's a nice mix of themes that you don't see often, and even if the technical limitations hinder the game from delivering a truly intense/atmospheric experience, I appreciate the difference in tone, especially in terms of its story the farther you dive into it. Within the levels, there is plenty of green and black but levels often rather feel like "levels" than actual places. More detail would have helped there.

CONTENT | 7/10
You have 10 levels I believe, all (most?) with multiple stages. 2 of those have you driving, 2 have you on rails. There are boss fights at the end of each level and probably over 10 minutes of storytelling all told. It's a good amount of content.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 6/10
This is mostly a very typical affair. Even though there are some levels where many enemies appear at once, it rarely really leans into the ridiculous like many other games do, even a game such as Ninja Gaiden, because enemies rarely take more than one hit to be defeated and you are such a tank with your own health. There is just one early difficulty spike for one boss that is just so insane that I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority of players back in the day didn't manage to beat it. Thanks to the magic of emulators and rewind, I was able to eventually get it down, but man was that ridiculously difficult, especially since almost everything else in this game is very beatable.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 5/10
Innovative in only one thing, and that is its focus on storytelling. The way it tells its story is completely copied from Ninja Gaiden, but let's rather call it 'inspired' and be happy that storytelling is actually happening, something I'm always a big fan of.

The game also features a good soundtrack, but is decidedly average in every other way.

REPLAYABILITY | 2/5
Not really replayable apart from trying to beat your high score. But it's an important game because it leans away from the arcade into a more story-focused experience, which at this time, many games still didn't do. It even gave you a lot of health instead of one hit-point like many other games, so it wasn't too concerned with artificially increasing the play time of this thing either.

PLAYABILITY | 4/5
Playable for the most part. It just has that typical NES slowdown issue whenever 5+ sprites appear on the screen simultaneously. It happens often enough that I deducted a point.

OVERALL | 60 - Average/Slightly Above-Average
Are you looking for something like the early Ninja Gaiden games in terms of storytelling, whilst the game maintained a similar retro style? Well, you don't have the wall jumping here, but other than that, Vice: Project Doom is the best comparison I could find so far. Storytelling is exactly the same, there is some (not a lot) of variety in gameplay and a very good soundtrack here, so give it a try. But don't expect anything special here, as this is one of the most average NES games you'll ever play apart from its storytelling.

VICE é um jogo incrível de NES. Temos cutscenes que apresentam a história entre cada fase e uma variedade interessante de gameplay com 3 tipos de modo de jogo. O principal é um platformer com 3 tipos de armas que dão variedade e arsenal ao jogador, com espada, tiro de pistola ou arremesso de granadas.

O uso de cada arma dá um tipo de jogabilidade diferente, apesar de haver limitação da munição das armas de longa distância. Se fossemos comparar com, por exemplo, Megaman X, temos em um só personagem o Zero e o X, ressalvadas as limitações.

Essa variedade não é tão impactante durante as fases, mas faz muita diferença nos chefes, já que o risco do melee traz um dano mais alto e mais rápido, acelerando o combate.

Os outros dois modos são utilizados apenas duas vezes cada durante o jogo, e são um modo de perseguição de carro que na verdade mais parece um shooter de navinha, e um modo de "light gun", onde você atira em inimigos com uma câmera em primeira pessoa, similar a jogos como Virtua Cop.

O roteiro é bem na vibe de filme da sessão da tarde, com a pegada "brucutu" das obras com Charles Bronson, Chuck Norris, ou mais recente, Keanu Reeves (John Wick). Um homem irá lutar contra um sindicato do mal para solucionar uma ameaça à cidade. Isso tá estampado desde a capa do jogo.

O curioso é que se trata de um jogo japonês, inclusive seu nome no Japão é Gun Deck (ガンデック), com uma pegada totalmente cinema hollywodiano.

Eu fiquei surpreso o quão redondo e rico ele é para os padrões do NES, mas não é de admirar tanto pela época de lançamento. Em 1991 já se havia evoluído bastante da massa de jogos arcade da primeira leva que ocorreu por volta de 1985, próximo do lançamento do próprio console.