[Review] Heavy Weapon

[Love Pulse]

 

The Heavy Weapon formula has been applied countless times in the short history of videogames. You've surely played this game before, but perhaps not with this much flash backing it up. Heavy Weapon puts you in command of a tank. Not just any tank, mind you. The year is 1984 so the vehicle must be atomic. Each level puts you on a flat, scrolling ground and sends waves of planes, helicopters, and other exotic enemies at you as you try to shoot them down while avoiding their attacks. The left analog stick controls your motion to the left or right while the right stick aims your fire. Simple and sweet.

 

 Of course you'll pick up power-ups such as shields, rapid fire, and the ever important spread gun as you fight through each level. When each mission is over, you're given a choice as to how you want to upgrade your tank from a list of various weapons and defense improvements, thus ensuring that by the end of the game you can almost entirely blanket the screen with your antiaircraft fire. You'll find this highly necessary, too, since the skies above you towards the end of the game will be almost entirely filled with targets. It's an age old formula that can still be fun to this day. Who doesn't want to man an atomic tank and shoot thousands of planes out of the sky?
 

 

Heavy Weapon does several things well enough to make it worth a look. For starters, it has some great presentation. The developers know that this is a throwback game, so they added all of the self referential humor and little touches necessary to make the game enjoyable. Take the nuclear bombs you can collect as an example. Screen wiping bombs are nothing new in this style of game, but when you pull the trigger on these you get a nice mushroom cloud off in the background - miles away from where you currently sit. If you need more, just boot up the game and listen to the music that plays over the introductory screen. The game also looks nice for a downloadable shooter. The cartoon style is reminiscent of the Metal Slug series, but looks even better thanks to the high resolution display.

 

If all of this sounds like pure fun, know that Heavy Weapon will set you back $10, a pretty hefty price for the amount of real content you're getting. The game boasts 19 missions for you to blast your way through alone or with up to three friends. The problem here is that after you complete the first nine, you're asked to repeat them over again with more enemies thrown at you. With no new enemies presented over the latter portion of the game and each boss merely being a repeat of ones you've already seen (until the final one), Heavy Weapon really starts to drag. The joy of beating a tough level and moving on is quickly taken away when you realize you're doing the exact same thing again on a background you've already seen. You can beat the game in a few hours, too, which makes that dragging sensation all the more troublesome. One nice touch that somewhat mitigates this problem is that the enemies thrown at you are somewhat randomized for each stage. While they come in specific patterns and groupings, the order that these groupings appear is different every time you load up a stage so you don't immediately feel like you're doing the same thing over and over.

 

 

 Once you do make it through the mission mode, a boss blitz challenge is unlocked. This mode gives you a single life and tasks you with beating each of the 19 bosses, though once again you'll only face 10 unique battles here and just repeat nine of them. The boss fights in Heavy Weapon are not very interesting and fairly easy, but beating them all in a row without dying is certainly difficult. Does difficult equate to good? If you've played through the entirety of the mission mode, there isn't anything new here to see and there isn't really much to provide the motivation to keep at it.

 

 

 The last offline mode is the standard survival challenge. You're given three lives and are presented with a never ending stream of enemies. As you survive to specific lengths, more difficult enemies and enemy patterns are introduced. For a quick game to test your shooter skills, this mode has everything you need. You'll hardly be able to last long enough to get that repetitive feeling that the mission mode has and the action ramps up to adrenaline pumping levels quite quickly.