Whatever happened to the classic shoot ‘em up? Where the player could amble along without having to worry about directions and 360-degree environments, happily shooting planes, helicopters, spaceships, motherships, battleships, moths, lizards, two headed pandas and anything else to crawl out of the creators’ minds? The genre may well have slowly taken a plummet into the depths of gaming past, but THQ have made an effort to resurrect it with 3D Interceptor. The “3D” in the title refers to the fact you fly ‘into’ the screen and face the enemy head on, as if you were sat in the cockpit of your futuristic fighter itself.
From the off you’ll take on fighter jets, attack helicopters and surface-to-air missiles in order to progress and fight your way through the ranks of the US Air Force. One level stolen straight from Star Wars requires flying over and under obstacles in a trench to make it to the end, though not to blow up the Death Star, but simply to fly off into the hazy distance. Through the use of simple controls, the only requirement is to concentrate on shooting the baddies and dodging their fire, and the handling of your plane is certainly well crafted, as are firing the guns and missiles. From time to time the jet will get in the way of your line of sight and, moving aside, all you’ll see is a missile heading straight out the screen, but otherwise the gameplay is very smooth and generates a genuine sense of fun.
Ominous signs start to appear as you progress past the first few levels though, as déjà vu suddenly creeps in and you realise that the mission you’re on seems very similar... Many of the missions simply reuse the same backgrounds and themes, merely adding a couple more enemies for you to down to prolong the experience. The fatal blow comes after level eight, when, having just played the same four levels back to back, you discover with enormous dread that the game’s over. That’s it, no more, finito! Instead of feeling like Maverick from Top Gun, you begin to wish you were his less fortunate co-pilot, Goose, who’s put out of his misery before being scraped off the inside of the cockpit with a spoon. Within 30 minutes the game is over and, to make matters worse, there are no different missions, difficulty settings or bonus games to keep the player amused. What they have been kind enough to include (at no extra cost) are huge levels of disappointment, mountains of frustration and a joyous sense of feeling cheated, robbed and clipped around the ear for no apparent reason.
To squander such an opportunity when the first few levels show so much promise have caused this game to suffer incredibly. 3D Interceptor could have been a real joy, and an engaging one at that, but will inevitably be forgotten by the pocket gaming world. That is, unless you’ve actually paid for this underwhelming and half-hearted game, then you won’t forget it in a hurry.
3D Interceptor
Fun game let down by laziness. Hugely disappointing.
