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| | | You'd think that with a name like "Heavy Unit" (is it just coincidence that I'm writing this right after writing about "Alzadick" (entry 543)?) and a name like Taito on the case, you'd have one fine game on your hands. You'd be wrong, because Heavy Unit is a bad game.
It has a neat premise, that you control a transforming robot/jetplane thing, like in Macross. Unfortunately you start as the plane, and the plane is slow and has no firepower. Once you get a "T" powerup to Tranform into the robot, things get better (the robot has much more firepower, and doesn't look like a flying metal salami sandwich), but only barely.
Although I haven't been able to get very far, the enemies I've seen have all been pretty horribly designed. It starts off with grey flying skull snakes and doesn't get much better from there. Worst of all, the plotting of the stages feels almost entirely random. For instance, in one particularly puzzling sequence, you fly under some flesh-chunk-dropping barnacley ceiling creatures, then a big devil face on a wall in front of you spits a bit spikey snake thing at you out of its mouth, all you can do is duck and suddenly the screen pans down and you're underwater, with round drone things appearing around you out of nowhere. Um... yeah.
Soon after that you get to the first boss and not only is he really boring to fight, but he's got some nasty patterns that will kill you quicker'n lightning. That wouldn't be so bad, except that you come back as the jetplane with pretty much no powerups, and then get to face the boss again. It's kind of like what happens when you die in Gradius (entry 104), for instance, only worse because the plane is really, really lame and the boss is dumb-looking. Boogers! |
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