1942: Joint Strike review (PlayStation 3)

‘1942: Joint Strike combines classic top-down shooting with amazing 3D HD graphics’ claims the PSN product description. Indeed, the 194x arcade series is back, with the same retro action, and despite a lot happening onscreen at once, calling the graphics ‘amazing’ would be a slight extension of the truth. To be fair, they’re not bad, but hardly the pinnacle of current generation games; part of me considers that if you removed the HD, you’d still be looking at a retro PS2 game instead.

The game borrows different aspects from the games in the series to end up with a fun little blaster. Little being the operative word. Grab the 130ish Mb demo and you’ll have a few minutes of quick blasting joy, but slapping down £6.99 will only net you another 4 similarly timed and themed stages, making the length of game/value ratio quite low, although the full game is the same file size, so I would have appreciated some kind of unlock ‘key’ rather than a redownload.

Mechanics of dogfighting

Let’s be honest here. There is little point in me explaining the gameplay beyond moving your plane out of the path of oncoming bullets and fire upwards to destroy waves of attackers. Unless you’re new to gaming, you will have seen them at arcades, played them on early machines and if you are anything like me, got frustrated at losing your final life at the end boss, requiring another coin to take the last few shots at it. When you first fire up the game, you’ll be reminded of the fun you once had and the pure simplicity of gaming where pinpoint movements and lightning fast reactions would be the only way of defeating the insurmountable odds ahead of you.

Yes, it’s still fun, but only in brief sessions. Being a remake, you won’t have any save points or checkpoints to return to if you lose your lives. If you die on the last boss you’ll have to play through the entire game again to get there, and sitting amongst the current gen ‘designed to let you see the whole game’ products it may take you a second to readjust (or just pump down the difficulty, raising the number of lives you’ll have). Since the game is so short anyway, it is never a big issue to start again, since you’ll be playing for the fun of playing rather than to reach the lavishly produced end-cinematic. There is no lavishly produced end-cinematic.

Bombs and titular attacks

While decimating enemies you may come across the staple diet of classic gamers everywhere, the power up. Indeed, a rare 1UP extra life may appear, a health replenishment (forgivingly you have a health bar which depletes as you are hit, rather than an instant death) or a weapon token. These vary from the obligatory spread shot, a ‘concentrated multi-bullet’ attack and a ‘laser that fires through everything but does slightly less damage’ weapon. These can be upgraded to a second, more powerful grade if you pick up the same token type twice in a row, waiting for each type to change is simply a matter of time before picking it up.

Then there are the time limited ‘super weapons’ which give you a more powerful fast firing chain gun style attack or a slower firing powerful rocket, but these run out in a matter of seconds after picking them up. Firing will tire out your thumb as you have to repeatedly stab at the X button to keep it going, a design decision perhaps based out of necessity to include a more powerful ‘charge’ shot if you decide to hold the button down. More interesting are the homing missiles, activated by the circle or square that are gained by damaging enemies which fills up a bar. Triangle uses your limited bombs (while performing a loop the loop out of the action) which wipes the screen clear of enemies and bullets, but are best saved to weaken bosses. As soon as you add another player into the mix however, through local or online play, your missiles are replaced by ‘Joint Strikes’, chosen by each player after selecting a plane.

Attack… together?

Joint Strikes require both players to work together (more than normally) to make the attack effective. Essentially, they attack the points between each plane, so activating them will cause deadly lighting to arc between the players, a massive fireball style projectile to shoot from one to the other, or a big explosion between them. It encourages teamwork in an otherwise ‘every man for himself’ gameplay style. Compensating for your extra firepower, the coop mode throws more enemies at you and generally gives a harder experience in the hope that you’ll still want to grind through to reach the end.

Graphically the game gives you 2D action in a 3D world, and keeps the frame rate up throughout the game, although having plentiful 2D sprite bullets flying around should hardly tax a modern console. Taxing however has been finding an online companion to play with. I’ve only managed it a few times, after waiting in a lobby for 20 minutes before even seeing another game on occasion. I never had any problems online beyond finding a game and getting connected, but other users are reporting the occasional bug, which considering the focus on the game on coop action certainly seems unfortunate.

It’s not lazy, but that doesn’t make it good

Sure, Capcom could have slapped the originals onto the PSN and had done with it, since 1942 will appeal mainly to fans of the arcade cabinets, but it is nice to see the effort in updating the game in its entirety. Even if you’ve never played the originals, you’ll probably find some classic entertainment here, but once you’ve played through a few times there’s little that will keep you coming back for more. No trophy support means you won’t really care about the score that you’re given at the end of each stage, and with such a short product, it won’t take you long until you’ve played through it all with every combination of plane, joint strike and friend you have.

It is this shortness of experience and relatively shallow gameplay that makes it difficult to see why it is worth the £6.99 asking price, comparing it to many of the other titles available on the PlayStation Network. Just because I don’t feel it’s not worth the money however doesn’t make it a bad game. You’ll have fun, but not for long, and it’s really a question of how much you’re in love with the classic shooter game style and probably familiarity with the originals. Now, if someone did a remake of SWIV…