"More like Space Fortress"

Don't be fooled by the name of the game. This is more of a Space Fortress then an Air Fortress. When you turn on this game, you will see an opening with an unimpressive picture of about eight fortresses in the air (perhaps that's what they meant by Air Fortress?) and the first one blinking saying ''You have encountered the _st frontier''. This will keep showing during the game, except fortresses you have conquered will be blue.

The hero is a guy named Hal, who has to blow up each of the nine fortresses. Why, I don't know, but it must be for good reason if he is doing it. You started each level on your rocket blowing up all the enemies, and once you made it to the end you go inside the fortresses and fight off enemies as you go through the fortress. Your energy depletes each time you move, but you can stop moving and it will replenish. I don't know why it does this though.

The gameplay is pretty much straight forward. There are two different parts of each fortress. The first is the shooting part. You start out on a carpet like thing, while you shoot different enemies trying to stop you from entering the fortress. During this you have to pick up energy and missile power ups. After you make it to the end, your carpet like thing will land, and your guy gets out and goes inside the fortress to destroy it. You will have to shoot lots of enemies while going on the journey through the fortress. You will have one gun in the first part and two in the second part. However, the weapons never change, so you will only have two weapons. But I prefer this, so I won't have to worry about different weapons, and crud like that.

Control is a feature that the game has a slight problem with. In most cases, you’re simply moving your character through the different stages while shooting at the enemies, but when the game play switches up, you have a different set up for weapons. At the first part of each fortress, you merely have to keep your guy moving around the stage and keep the enemies away from you. However, after you make it to the second part, you have to use some fine movement and keep your weapons as well as energy trained to a fine point, otherwise you'll be looking at a game over screen more often than not!

The audio is decent, it appears that they tried to put in the Action / Adventure feel to it. However, it shows that they repeated the music a lot of times, and they also did a few variations from the same sounds. The effects generally are a few from when you shoot at enemies, and a couple explosions thrown in to make it sound like a shooter. When it comes down to it, the sounds are decent, nothing to love, nothing to hate.

Air Fortress will remind you of a few different games when it comes to graphics. Metroid will come to mind. A lot of the dark backgrounds and the insides of each fortress are neat to look at, even though they do look just like each other. They made clones of the fortress? The character and enemy designs seem to have been kidnapped from Metroid. Well, maybe not kidnapped, but taken from. The graphics are decent, but not excellent, mediocre, not horrible.

Air Fortress is an old NES game that has some pretty good points to it. While keeping the premise of the game simple, it has enough of the shooter / puzzle genre in it to make a decent game to add to your collection. However, if you're a genre specific type of gamer and you can't stand games that cross over, then you need to skip this one and head for something a little different. This is a simple game, but this is worth of being in your collection.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 08/22/03