Developer: SNKPublisher: SNK
Console: Neo-Geo
Release Date: June 1994
Set many years in the future, when mankind has colonized the far reaches of space, an evil group of space pirates known as the Klaptons are wrecking havoc through the galaxy. Authorities can’t handle them, so they placed huge bounties on their heads in the hopes that some brave hero will claim them and restore peace to the universe. Bounty hunters Roddy and Cathy answer the call and promise to bring down the space pirates for good.
Although the game looks like a Metal Slug clone at first, the game mechanics are not about shooting stuff. You actually fight hand-to-hand close quarters combat, picking up enemies, stones, crates, etc. and tossing them around. Roddy and Cathy have retractable arms that stretch pretty far to grab baddies or items lying around. By using Street Fighter-like controller motions you can throw fireballs and perform rising punches and kicks. Both playable characters have the exact same moves, so it makes no different which one you choose. Two players can play the game simultaneously.
Every stage has two layers where you can walk on; one on the foreground and one in the background. With the press of a button your character will jump-kick to the next layer, just like in Fatal Fury. This feature is cool at first but because your characters don’t scale in size when they jump to the background it’s hard to see in which layer the bad guys and items are. You’ll occasionally find a gun or a bomb to use as weapons, and even commandeer a big bi-pedal armored walker, similar to the one in Mega Man X.
The game is divided in four main worlds, each with two sections and a boss in each. There are fire, ice, forest and wind themed levels. The enemies vary from state to stage, but they behave the same. Some bosses fight you on foot, but most operate huge machines. After you beat all four worlds you’ll travel to the Klaptons’ spaceship for one last round of ass-kicking.
The level of detail in the graphics is awesome. Every background has plenty of stuff going on, with cascades, lava rivers, trees shaking in the wind, etc. The characters also look pretty nice, but unfortunately don’t animate that well. If it had better animation you could easily mistake this for Metal Slug.
I wasn’t too impressed with the audio, but it’s not bad. Standard sound effects of gunshots, punches and creature roars. The music is forgettable but you’ll be too busy fighting bad guys and trying to survive to care.
While decent, Top Hunter doesn’t provide enough variety to be a truly fun game. After a few minutes of picking stuff up and tossing it around you’ll wish there was more depth and replay value. Playing with a friend helps, but it also makes things more confusing with everything that’s going on. Infinite continues pretty much ruin the fun of beating each tough boss, so you’ll just breeze through the levels not caring to pick up items or power-ups. Why bother, right? Top Hunter worked better as a quarter-muncher at the arcade than on a home console because of this.
Score:
2 Comments:
Wow, at first I thought you had actually found a VC game that you actually liked! But then I read the rest of the review. :P
I also notice that a lot of these games you review are from SNK or otherwise Neo Geo. :P
I thought Alien Soldier wasn't that bad, just too damn hard. Top Hunter is just average.
I thought about reviewing Super Mario Bros. 3 and Sonic the Hedgehog, but pretty much everyone already played those games. That's why I mostly review Neo-Geo and TurboGrafx 16 games, because not many people owned those consoles.
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