A Review of Airwolf (NES)

Airwolf is a helicopter simulation action game released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1988 and was developed by Acclaim. This was a very early game in the NES' career. Let's see how it stacks up.

Story : No story to speak of here. Is Airwolf based on something? I don't really know or care. You fly a helicopter and you do military stuff that include killing a lot of nameless henchmen, rescuing hostages, and document stealing. If you like espionage perhaps you can get in this game.

Graphics : The graphics in Airwolf are really bad. They were early in the NES' career and it shows. The background is just two solid colors, the main helicopter has a neat looking control panel but not much else, the enemies are non-animated flying objects, the missiles and bullets are just generic pixels. In other words, there's absolutely nothing good to look at in this game. There are some cool pre mission graphics and such, which were quite good for their time, but there's nothing else to mention here.

Sound : There's only one song in this entire game, I'm not kidding. It's a good song but how about some variety? There is none. That one song doesn't even play during the game! Only during the cut scenes and intro screen. Unbelievable. The sound effects are completely minimal, you don't hear much at all.

Game play : One of the worst flight games around, you spend most of this game just going left or right until an enemy is centered on your screen. Every level in this game feels identical, and in fact I think it is. The controls are responsive but that hardly matters when the game is not fun at all. The levels are too long, too unsatisfying, and have the same objectives every time.

I can't say enough for the poor level design here. This game was pretty much a lazy attempt at a flight game using a license nobody cares about. They didn't even attempt to make this game fun, just playable. There's also many graphical glitches and it's not due to my cart's age either.

Re playability : Not playable, not re playable, not anything.

Overall : 1/10. A poor game that showcases just what Acclaim has in store for the video game world for many years to come. Really, stay away from this one at all costs and play Afterburner or Top Gun instead.