LADYDRAGON.COM - Barrage

When fast and relatively inexpensive 3D accelerator cards for the home PC began appearing, games with truly kick-ass graphics came along with them. The first jaw dropping dose of eye-candy came with GLQuake back in '96. Since that time, virtually every PC release has had similar or better graphics.

In comes Barrage. As is the current trend, this game is very pretty. Large explosions abound with particles strewn all over the place. Fighter jets and missiles leave vapor trails as they whiz across the screen. In short, this game looks better than most games you could play on any of the home consoles.

However, for a game to capture and keep your attention it needs more than good looks. It needs depth/substance/gameplay and Barrage just doesn't have it. I'll explain.

There is no real story in this game at all. You're given a type of aircraft that can fly around fairly quickly or can hover in a stationary position. It can also maneouvre quite energetically as well, which is not necessarily a good thing, but more on that later.

You take your craft into an arena in which are placed several targets for you to destroy or fly through. Once all targets have been eliminated or you've made contact with them, a portal appears for you to enter, which takes you to the next arena. While you're in any of the arenas, a number of military units like missile launchers, attack aircraft and tanks are in there with you and try to shoot you down.

Glare from the sun obstructs your view.

Things blow up real nice in Barrage.

That's it. That's the whole game. There's a multiplayer option as well, and you can duke it out against other human pilots at the Microsoft Gaming Zone, but I didn't try it out.There's no attempt to save the world from some nefarious plot, no other pilots to banter with over the radio. None of that. Just fly around and shoot things until a portal opens and then fly through the portal.

If all you're looking for in a game is pretty graphics and an excuse to blow things up, then this is the game for you.Ordinarily, that would be enough for me as well. Hell, I still play Robotron to this day. But the controls in Barrage have some faults that get in the way of the joy of sheer carnage.

You can adjust the movement controls in six different ways to cater to your own particular preference, but, as hard as I tried, I could not get my plane to fly comfortably. You end up with a plane that either floats around a little or floats around a lot.

By floating I mean that the controls overcompensate. After moving your joystick/mouse in a particular direction and then stopping, your plane's inertia continues to move you in that direction. You can try jerking to the opposite direction to correct this, but you'll just end up with the same inertial float in the new direction. This of course, makes targeting enemies needlessly difficult and frustrating.

If you're looking for an arcade style flight combat shooter with nice graphics, get yourself a copy of Forsaken or Incoming.
Barrage still needs some work.

Company:
Activision
www.activision.com

Category:
Flight combat shooter

NOTES:

Interest: 50%
Control : 50%
Graphics: 80%
Sound : 80%
Originality : 60%

TOTAL : 64%

Requirements:

Operating System:
Windows 95/98

Processor:
Pentium 166MHz or better

Memory:
32 MB of RAM

Hard Drive:
98 MB minimum

Sound Card:
Windows 95/98 compatible sound card

Video:
D3D or 3DFX/Glide supported 3D card

Stefan Lister