Black Hole Assault

"Worst fighting game ever?"

OK this may have been one of the first games on the SEGA CD but it is still one of the worst games ever made. This “game” is suppose to be a revolutionary fighting game but it must be one of the worst games I have ever played.

I will start this out with the best bit of the game, which is unfortunately the into sequence. It's a little cartoon piece put together which explains what is happening in the story. The story is about how humans have sent out exploratory ships to other planets, but many of going missing. It turns out evil robots are destroying them and their next target is Earth. The humans send out mechs to destroy these robots and rid of them forever.

This is a fighting game in the style of Street Fighter 2, an oversight as this really would have made an ideal shooting game. Instead you get this abomination. You control one robot (you can select different ones before a fight) and fight against others on different planets.

The controls for this game are the exact same as Fatal Fury 1. There is a punch button, a kick button and a throw button. Throws only work when you are close to the opponent robot, as only then can you grab them.

When you finally start playing the game, you'll switch your SEGA CD off after a minute. This must be one of the clumsiest fighting games I have ever played. Just simple moving your robot from one side of the screen to the other takes ages as they are so slow. All the robots also animate really poorly, with little animation and hardly any moves apart from variants of punching and kicking. There are no special moves either, so you have to rely on punches, kicks and throws either. This makes the game a step back from games like Street Fighter 2 or Mortal Kombat. The main focus of a fighting game is still here though –each robot has an energy bar, and by attacking the opponent you wear the energy bar down. Get rid of all the energy in the bar to destroy the other robot. In this game, fights are one round only instead of the usual 2.

I've already mentioned how the robots have next to no animation at all, but to add more insult to injury, this game uses nothing that the SEGA CD specializes in, such as rotation. So in reality, this game could have easily been on a standard Genesis cartridge (the intro sequence would not have made it but apart from that) so I don't know what this game is doing on the SEGA CD.

This is one of the worst SEGA CD games, one of the worst fighting games, and one of the worst games in general of all time. Avoid Black hole Assault and buy a good fighting game like Final Fight CD or Mortal Kombat CD instead.

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 11/28/05