Ikari III: The Rescue

"Low-quality beat-'em-up action"

Ikari Warriors III: The Rescue is the third and final game in SNK's Ikari Warriors series for the NES. The first two games featured Paul and Vince, two Rambo-like soldiers, shooting tons of enemies and blowing lots of stuff up. This game, however, is about hand-to-hand combat. Occasionally you'll get a gun or a grenade, but for the most part it's straight ahead punching and kicking from an overhead view.

From what I gathered from the ''intro'', the young daughter of somebody important has been kidnapped by some evil leader of a foreign country. Paul and Vince get to go rescue her through wanton violence and mayhem. Standard NES fare.

Your faceless heroes punch and kick through a mere six levels, either jungles or army bases, with an underwater level to try to break up the monotony. Hundreds of enemy soldiers await them, but they all look the same. Some take a single hit, others as many as eight, but there's no way to differentiate who's tough and who's weak. The environments are bland with one-color trees, crates, and trucks all over the place. Sometimes there's just plain black. You might mistake it for a bottomless pit, but there's none of those in this game.

As I said before, you can either punch or kick. The kick is some kind of funky roundhouse kick that rarely connects. You can also do a jumpkick which only ends up being useful the one time flying enemies appear. The enemies' kicks are even better though. They jump up and down, spinning three or four times with their leg extended, just waiting for you to run into it. I'm surprised they're not figure skaters.

You can pick up hearts which refill your life meter or a ''W'' (must stand for Weapon, how clever) which gives you a gun with limited bullets or a single grenade which has a very limited blast radius. That life meter goes down rapidly as you get hit, especially when fighting multiple enemies. Your hero is just too slow and clunky to react to getting hit from all sides. Also, there's plenty of instant kills, like bullets, grenades, land mines, exploding barrels, and thrown rocks.

Sound challenging? It isn't. You have three lives, but you also have unlimited continues. Furthermore, the continues start you EXACTLY where you died, not from the beginning of the level. This basically sucks all the challenge from the game, as death is meaningless and you can just keep going until you've finished the game. And that doesn't take very long, an hour max.

There's a two-player simultaneous mode to try to spice things up, but with such little fun and such mindless repetition throughout the game, the multiplayer mode is no better than the single player.

Nothing much to recommend here, just another notch in the NES gamer's action belt.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 04/24/00, Updated 04/24/00