Jackal

"Furious like a tiger, I mean, like a jackal!"

Jackal is a wonderful action game made by Konami back in 1988. I can’t remember how many times I rented this game during my childhood, but I sure spent a good amount on it.

Jackal plays like a shooter, it is like playing Axelay or Gradius but with a jeep instead of a space ship, and well, you are free to go wherever you want.
The controls work quite good, our jeep is extremely easy to use, it is a bit hard to use the main gun at the beginning but you will get used very quickly. The only little problem could be that our vehicle is a bit slow, but only a little.

The graphics, considering how old the game is, and considering that it has less than one megabyte of memory, are splendid, more that splendid they are terrific; music is tremendously repetitive, but the important thing about the music is that, even being repetitive as hell, sets the mood perfectly, or at least that is what it looked like to me.

In the eight scenarios that wait ahead (each one with their respective final boss), our mission will be to rescue hostages, in all the scenarios we will see barracks, these barracks have prisoners inside and we will have to rescue and take them safe and sound to the nearest heliport, there they will be rescued. At the end of each mission, depending on how many soldiers we have rescued we will gain points and extra lives.

To defend from all the tanks, soldiers, planes, helicopters and avoid all the cannons, turrets, missiles and bombs we have a machine gun installed in our jeep as well as grenades, these grenades will later become missiles, which are faster and more powerful. To obtain missiles we will have to destroy brown barracks (the common barracks are usually green) which hold a special hostage that is shining, once we rescue him our grenades will become missiles, and the more of this special hostages we rescue the more powerful our missiles will be.

Jackal also has a terrific two player option, playing with a friend is twice as fun and adds a lot of replay value because this is one of those games you will be playing again and again all the time no matter how many times you have beaten it.

This game is really good, it is a bit slow but it is also great fun. Worth checking out.

””My lack of vocabulary and grammatical errors (if there’s any) are because I’m not from an English speaking country, sorry.””

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 12/09/03, Updated 12/22/03