Cabal

"Man, it sure is fun to just kill everything."

It can't get much simpler than this. Turn on Cabal, and you might expect a shooter in which you are given some type of objective while destroying everything in sight, but if you wanted such a thing, you'd be disappointed. In Cabal, your simple mission is to kill, kill, and kill some more until you've killed enough people to move onto the next battle.

Since this is so simple, you probably have realized that this game does not have a story, which is no real surprise to anyone that has played a shooter from this area in time. Stories are almost always nonexistent, so you simple have to use your weapons to kill anything that moves on your television screen. You stand in the foreground in your blue soldier uniform as you prepare to take on an entire army of enemies that bombard you with countless amounts of slow-moving bullets, grenades, and bombs that can simply kill you in a single blow. As you stand here, in the foreground, enemies will slowly come out in the background of the environment and start to fire at you. To complete a level, you have to kill a certain amount of enemies, keeping track with the meter and kill count at the bottom of your screen.

You are generally behind some walls when you begin a level, and they protect you from harm in the early stages of the battle. However, you'll soon realize that these are quite useless after roughly 30 seconds, as one single shot from an enemy's gun will cause the wall to crumble. However, a player can easily take advantage of this time, firing at foes while hiding behind the wall, since the wall does not stop you from shooting anywhere on the screen. It's as if the wall is never there, and you're shooting right through the wall and watching soldiers drop while they can't seem to get a shot at you.

Shooting is quite simple, but has a tendency to get rough and annoying at times. The reason for this is that you must control the movements of your soldier while moving the crosshair on the screen at the exact same time. Moving your character is less of a hassle since he does not have the ability to move closer to the enemy or back away; he can only strafe left and right across the screen. But still, it affects your aim with the crosshair. For instance, if you see an enemy standing to the left of your crosshair and would like to fire at him without moving your position, it's impossible because pressing the left button of the direction pad would cause your character to move to the left as well. Luckily, this is not a problem when trying to move your crosshair vertically, but still proves to be irritating when move horizontally.

The worst part of the control, however, is the inability to fire while moving your character. If you're moving across the field and suddenly land your crosshair on a foe, you can't just shoot him while running across. If you happen to press the fire button while running, your character simply stops and fires off while sitting there, open to enemy fire. The only way to avoid it is to stop for only a split second to shoot your gun, then quickly resume your strafing. Some, however, some may view this as a good thing, as it makes the battles intense.

I was not one of those people though, for I though the game had plenty of intensity already and didn't need any more. The battles are quickly paced and tough, and you'll find that you rarely get the chance to take breaks between shoot-outs. Every second of the battle is highlighted by a half-dozen bullets or so flying at you from all directions as well as bombs dropping out of the sky, so a player must stay on their toes, or fall in battle. Since you are normally taken down from just one shot, you'll find yourself falling to your knees at least a couple of times during every stage. Luckily, you are given quite a bit of continues, and you'll probably need every last one of them to plow through the stages. Each level has four separate sections, followed by a boss to defeat, and some of them will surely cost you some continues to defeat.

Fortunately, Cabal is not repetitive. As you progress, you'll find that more and more variations of enemies come your way, and some are very tough to take down. It is no easy task to defeat soldiers that are running behind trees and hiding in swamps while throwing grenades to explode tanks and still dodging bullets at the same time. As aforementioned, every second of the battle is intense and exciting, as you can probably imagine with all these obstacles thrown at you every second of the game. Luckily, when you destroy certain enemies, you are rewarded with some power-ups and new weapons to make your job easier and more enjoyable as well. Sometimes you'll find that you can pick up grenades to throw at the solders' hiding places to make things simple, or throwing a grenade onto a tank to blow it up rather than stand in one spot and fire several bullets at it. Like many shooters, these weapons must be used wisely and carefully, or else you'll waste grenades trying to blow up absolutely nothing in the landscape. Or, if you don't want to use things carefully, you can try to earn a bigger and more powerful gun to annihilate everything quickly as fast as possible, for it only lasts for a limited amount of time, then makes you revert back to your default gun.

Cabal is a very fun game to play for almost everyone. In all seriousness, I can say that not many other games allow you to have so much fun in the middle of a massacre. The game is especially fun if another player plugs in their controller to play as the red soldier to help you with your battles without altering the level of difficulty at all. This is a relief, as the game is already challenging enough as it is, with plenty of levels and tough bosses to keep your hands sweating while you try your best to anticipate the enemies' constant attacks.

Graphically, Cabal is quite satisfactory. The backgrounds were actually very diverse, allowing you to battle in a different environment for every level. Most of the battlefields were quite colorful in the background, providing a nice but rather unfitting look, especially when compared to the music played, which is not very cheery. Your character sprite is quite large because of its stance in the foreground and has plenty of small details included. On the other hand, the enemy sprites are small and unimpressive because of their position in the background and fail to impress you with their little guns. Everything else looks quite fine, and the graphics are quite nice overall, with the exception of the enemy sprites.

While you murder everyone in sight, you listen to a very low-pitches bass track. This track is extremely repetitive, which might cause people to mute their TVs with anger and annoyance, but it is extremely fitting with the scene of the battle, and it is actually a bit hypnotic. If you happen to sick of this music, you should surely be relieved when you come across a boss, with its excellent boss them to really get things pumping and make the experience enjoyable. My only complaint is that there is no music for the opening screen to accompany the picture of the skull, which seems rather awkward. Anything else heard in the game are small exploding sounds as certain things blow up, which sounded fairly decent.

If you're looking for a nice and interesting 8-bit shooter that forces you only to kill everything in site, Cabal is the perfect game. With the intense, difficult battles and different enemy-killing strategies, Cabal should be a nice time-killing game to play for almost anybody with some kind of taste.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 11/15/01, Updated 11/15/01