After Burner III for Sega CD
Review #12003
After Burner III
Now you can see forward, and behind
Gameplay
Same old After Burner gameplay, with a couple of wrinkles. The first is the inclusion of a cockpit view, which is a literal gamechanger. It can be toggled back to the annoying behind view if you prefer (I don't). I wish this could be toggled mid-game, but whatever.
The second change is an infrequent "chase" mode where either an enemy plane or a missile is on your tail. You have an afterburner and an air brake to lose your tail.
Overall I enjoyed this game more than the previous games in the series because I can see better. It's a fast game but isn't deep or engaging long-term. It's a fun 5 minute fix, but nothing beyond that.
Level Design
Stages are extremely short. Enemies come in waves that only allow you to fire at about half of them. Bascially just turn to on direction or the other, fire a couple of missiles, and hope that you don't get hit by an enemy missile. It gets repetitive quickly but feels good to progress between stages quickly. There's no bosses or even breaks between stages, so there honestly isn't much design to speak of.
Theme
Feels hokey compared to the straightforward Top Gun theme of the prior game. An opening cutscene includes a silly voiceover and horrible animation.
Art Style
Your plane looks good, although it has a poly look instead of pure pixels. Enemy planes look ok but don't scale well at all. The backgrounds, on the other hand, look like they were ripped from an 8-bit title. So, so bad. I preferred the all-pixel artwork of After Burner 2, thank you very much. The cockpit view is a bare-bones, dithered mess. Yuck
Audio
Kinda lame music. Sounds like it was pulled from Magnum P.I. or some other 80s action sitcom. Excellent voices and sound effects.
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