Heavy Unit

"Kaneko and Inter State should APOLOGIZE for this!"

Heavy Unit disappointed me heavily. When I saw the credits as Inter State I was excited and immediately started up the game. I quickly saw that it would not measure up to the amazing Super Star Soldier or any other really good shooter. However, I decided to keep going as it was easy enough.

The first level impressed me enough to continue playing the game despite the fact that I could already see some major problems. Before I get into the problems of the game let me state what is good about stage 1. Cool looking skulls enemies quickly appear and will most likely kill you. Then you will most likely die by turrets, and then you will most likely die by...etc. You get the idea. The first level has lots of cool looking things that appear on screen, like a giant demonic face that closes and opens it's mouth as you shoot it. But once you beat the easy first boss the game starts to go downhill rapidly.

The second level has an extremely repetitive background, and few interesting looking enemies. The level is larger than the screen at parts which is pretty cool, but when the level decreases in height it will force you to move up. This causes lots of unpleasant deaths. The boss is BY FAR the worst boss I have had to fight. It looks kind of interesting, but that is it. It does four things. It jumps forward and back. It fires a few shots when it lands to the right of the screen, and when it lands forward it shots lots of large fast moving red balls. It takes about 2-3 minutes of shooting to kill it. And the boss music is the worst boss music I have ever heard. It is completely UN-fun.

From there on out everything goes to hell. No interesting enemies. No interesting backgrounds. The only thing that I had fun on was the 5th boss and the 6th boss.

Now let me enlighten you as to some of the problems in the game.

The first problem is with progress in the game. The game has checkpoints as you go through the level. But getting to a checkpoint does not make any sense in this game. You can go to the next checkpoint way before you even pass it! All you have to do is die a bit before reaching it. This made progress through the game very fast for me. I only had to half ass most of the sections to get to the boss. But there are notable problems on the 5th level with checkpoints. The 5th level is a gauntlet of crappy bosses. Once you kill a boss you should get to the next checkpoint right? NO. You have to start fighting the next boss to get to the next checkpoint, which makes no sense since they are like 5 seconds apart. If, you accidentally bump into a wall before the boss fight starts, you will be forced to re-fight the last crappy boss. And since each fight takes 2-3 minutes of shooting your extremely crappy weapon while dodging things that will kill you in one hit, you will not be a happy camper.
So to sum this up, the game has problems with getting you to a checkpoint too early, and getting you to a checkpoint to late.

The second problem is the lack of a good ship. The ship you are provided with can be upgraded to something passable, with a nice attack range and speed. The ship seems to modeled after the Darius-type ships. You get a little laser, and missiles that fall forward. As you upgrade more lasers added, and the missile start falling up. I only got to taste the fully upgraded ship during the 5th boss. Before that boss they through a massive amount of upgrades at you, which they should have been doing throughout the game. Seems to me that they got it to play from start to finish then just released the thing. Anyway, your basic ship you get after you die is the low of the low. Even the lowest level ship in Gradius II is better than this steaming pile of crap. The ship has this lame looking small bullet that can only kill the weakest of enemies in any reasonable amount of time. It also is slow as tortoise. In order to dodge things, you will have to already have completely dodged it before the enemy even fires. If the ship had some speed and more power I would not be complaining as much, but you if you play the game you will understand what I am talking about.

All in all this game is terrible, a disgrace to the genre of shooters. A game that could have been good is far more disappointing than one that was crap from the get go. 3/10.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 08/01/08

Game Release: Heavy Unit (JP, 12/22/89)