After Burner Climax review

Remember the days when games were based around a core mechanic and lived or died by said mechanic? During that period of time, Sega birthed an arcade flight action game under the name After Burner. While the original did fairly good, when most people think of After Burner, the memories are almost always associated with the second game; holding the flight stick in the arcade while shooting down countless enemy planes at insane speed. While there was an After Burner 3, the series hadn't seen a sequel since the 90's, but all of that changed in 2006 with the arcade release of After Burner Climax. The game succeeds in catching the attention and quarters of many in the arcade, thanks to it's blistering speeds and somewhat familiar gameplay with a few new tweaks, but is it worth the price of admission to play at home?

Gameplay - 8/10

Just like Outrun Online Arcade, ABC succeeds in taking one solid mechanic and making an incredible game out of it. The default control scheme might take a while to get adjusted to, but its well worth the dedication. If it's still not clicking for you, there's a few custom control schemes that you can select from as well, which are great, but it's a bummer that you can't fully customize the layout. Once you've got that out of the way, you select your plane and take to the skies. For those hoping for a free roam flight game akin to Ace Combat, you'll quickly realize that Climax sticks to its roots and forces you to constantly move forward, allowing you to use the throttle to accelerate or decelerate, which becomes vital in dodging shots and evading enemies behind you. Although the game is constantly hurtling you in one direction, you're free to move in a fairly large area using the left stick, all while using your machine gun to take down nearby enemies or locking onto them with your missiles before letting them go. The last thing in the controls department is the inclusion of the climax mode, where everything slows down, allowing you to lock on to tons of targets at once while making some dodges that would otherwise have been incredibly tricky, then firing off a volley of missiles, taking down all of the selected targets almost instantaneously. Unfortunately, that's about as far as the game goes in terms of controls.
Due to the unrelenting forward movement, the game also normally only takes between 8-12 minutes to finish, which would be a huge problem if this was an epic first person shooter or something, but despite its simple controls and short total gameplay time, chances are that you won't be making it to the end in your first few playthroughs (JUST LIKE IN OUTRUN!), since you're initially only given 3 credits to work with. In spite of what I said about the simple controls earlier, there's a surprisingly deep combo-chaining system present here that rewards you for continuously stringing together kills before a timer runs out, meaning that you occasionally need to leave one or two stragglers if you want to continue chaining between waves of enemies. After each mission, you're ranked on how well you did, along with getting letter grades after every 4 stages or so, which usually give you a chance to take a branching path to reach the ending.



Graphics - 7/10

When you first fire it up, you'll realize how incredibly well this looks for not only a downloadable game, but also as a next-gen game. All of this will be made more amazing once you realize the game was released in arcades back in 2006! As you blaze through the games levels, the variety of environments will continue to impress you, constantly making you wonder what the next level looks like or what the other path might lead to. The planes featured in the game all sport a surprising amount of detail and the explosions all look incredibly satisfying. The more you play, especially if you go for that achievement that requires you to finish the game with a D or E rank in speed (protip: hold the brake the whole game), you'll start realizing that under closer examination, the textures only look detailed if you're playing the game right (blazing through or just slowing down long enough to dodge enemy fire). This also brings to light that some of the effects are kind of...not as detailed as they look when you're going through faster, most notably the planes emerging from beneath the clouds, but as long as you keep your speed up, none of this will be an issue at all.

Sound - 6/10

ABC's biggest weakness is it's lackluster soundtrack. While I give Sega props for including the ability to use the Afterburner 2 soundtrack in the game, it still doesn't excuse how forgettable the soundtrack in this game is. It's appropriate considering this is an arcade flight combat game, but there's definitely not any jingles that are going to be left in your head or most likely songs that you really want to hear when you're not playing the game. The game does get an extra point for having some incredibly funny dialogue going on in the background, and I don't think that it's intentionally humorous, but it's almost campy for an arcade game "WOO! I MADE IT HERE FIRST!" There's just something really charming about the banter you hear between the pilots or the lack of concern in their voices as they take down an imaginary country's entire air force.



Overall - 7/10

After Burner Climax is highly recommended that everyone at least tries out, because it's a throwback to when games were pure and lived or died on one mechanic, this one being its combo system. Fortunately, it gets the combo system right, along with having tons of unlockables, and then you have the leaderboards and a personal high score board as well to encourage you to keep trying to do better. If you're not the kind of person that is addicted to constantly trying to see how much better you can do than your own previous best, the short nature of the game might make you want to leave it behind. Again, at least give the demo a shot, leave some comments, and let me know what you think.