Wing War (ColecoVision)

Wing War is not really a game about any sort of war. From what can be gleaned about the game, Wing War is the self-motivated quest of a dragon to collect three elemental crystals so it can acquire a diamond, only forced to really fight one foe to acquire it. In fact, the somewhat pacifistic route might be the easiest way to acquire the diamond, but the dragon is required to use its wings to do so, so the title isn’t completely incorrect.

Truthfully, the most challenging thing in Wing War is probably the use of your wings, as the gameplay revolves around making sure you can maneuver safely around often cramped caves or avoid enemies that, while usually pretty stationary, pose a challenge by potentially being in the path of your somewhat erratic method of flight. Flight in Wing War is controlled by repeated button presses, each press corresponding to a flap of your wings. Repeated presses can give you speed and pressing directions in addition to the button presses will allow you to build up or reduce momentum, with flight more about carefully flinging your dragon around the screen than any sense of real flight. Arresting your movement properly is pivotal to avoid hitting into many of the sedentary enemies, although there are moving ones as well that you might accidentally hurl yourself into. Momentum also carries between screens, and the sections shown in a single screen are often small and easy to exit with that built up speed that can hurt you when you’re thrust into a populated area. While some enemies are content to sit in place or just move around in a pattern, there are some who will attempt to chase you like bees and bats, and the yellow griffin will even pursue you between screens. Some foes even fire at you with fireballs, but while flight is the best method to avoid damage, you are given a means to strike back in the form of your own fire breath… your unfortunately limited fire breath.

When the game starts you’re hardly packing any fireballs, and while most enemies go down to one or two shots, the fireballs are slow and disappear quickly. Moving enemies, the ones you’d most likely wish to use the fireballs on, can get around them pretty easily unless you’re a crack shot or move in so close you’re endangering yourself, and health in Wing War is equally unfortunate. The numbers on the screen show you your fireball count and remaining health, with fireballs in red and health in blue, but if you did not know the blue was your health, it would be hard to tell you’re taking damage. You can fly through enemies and even rest on top of them, damage racking up without any visual indication it’s being dealt. While it stands to reason that contact with an enemy or their attack will reduce your health and you shouldn’t be caught too off-guard there, sometimes as I was flying about I’d notice my health bar just go down for reasons I could not explain. In seemingly safe areas, sometimes with no enemies present, I was suddenly missing a bit of health. Experimentation offered no answers on what the cause could be, as crashing into walls seemed not to hurt even at high speeds, so my best guess is sprite flickering perhaps made it so I couldn’t see certain enemies or attacks. If you do die, there are eggs back at the dragon’s nest that will hatch into back up dragons to continue the quest for the diamond, a quest that is oddly convoluted and definitely requires the player to read the manual to succeed at.

Before you can attempt to grab the diamond, you must first acquire three elemental crystals, but the way you do this is oddly specific and would be incredibly difficult to intuit due to the simple presentation of the game. To create a super crystal, you must assemble a fire crystal, water crystal, and air crystal in a specific manner or else it won’t count properly. First, you must grab either the fire or water crystal by pressing up while touching it and then bring it back to the nest without dropping it, something that occurs if you hit a wall or take damage. You can pick it back up after, provided it didn’t fall into a zone you can’t reach or pass through the floor and disappear. After recovering the first crystal, you must then acquire the air crystal. If you acquire the air crystal first, it will disappear, and if you acquire the opposing crystal to your first crystal, they cancel each other out and you need to grab all three over again. After you’ve got either fire or water and the air crystal, you can grab the last one you need and you will see you now have a flashing number on your screen indicating the super crystal was created as well as getting a boost to your health and fireball count. In fact, collecting crystals is the main means of replenishing these numbers, so there is a way to continue even if you’re running low on either. Seemingly, the relationship with fireball production might be why you can acquire crystals without defeating enemies. On defeat, most enemies will drop one of the crystals, and while the fire crystal is a clear and distinct red, the flashing water and air crystals look similar since they are blue and white respectively but sort of twinkle to look like the other color. While enemies are the obvious source for crystals, there are places in the small game world where crystals occur naturally, like a volcano that spits up fire crystals or air crystals that just drop out of the sky now and again. This is how you can get away without killing a single enemy, at least at first, because once you have acquired the super crystal, get the buff to your fireball range, and have the fireball count to manage the battle, you face the only foe you can’t avoid killing on your path to the diamond: the rock demon.

The rock demon is a small black goblin-looking thing blocking the only tunnel you can’t pass through at game start, and touching him causes an instant death. To defeat him you must hit him with an unprecedented six fireballs, but much like you can’t tell when your dragon takes damage, it’s hard to discern when you’ve landed a shot successfully on the rock demon. This is compounded further by the area you fight him in, where the only angle you can fire your straight horizontal shots at him from puts you in the path of his fireballs. Your fireballs may collide in the air to cancel each other out, but you also must fire them through a rock wall, your reach still being pretty poor even after a super crystal is made. To actually push through and hit him either requires more crystal farming or throwing your dragon toward the rock wall so its fireball shot will carry some of the momentum and hit the rock demon, provided you’re at the right angle and it isn’t attacking at the time. Once it has been defeated you fly into the next room, pick up the diamond, and turn back to see… the rock demon is back but is now blocking the exit to the diamond chamber. If you had used up all your fireballs to kill it, you’re not getting out alive, but a clever kamikaze dive can cause your dragon’s dead body to hurl the diamond behind the rock demon so that the next born dragon can just fly in and pick up the jewel to take it back to the nest. Once you’ve successfully brought the diamond home… that’s essentially it. You can keep collecting crystals and killing enemies for points, but you’ve done, in essence, all the game has to offer at that point. You’ve tossed your dragon around the air to collect convoluted crystals and faced down a frustrating rock demon, and the only thing left to do is do it all again until you’re out of back-up dragons.

THE VERDICT: Wing War’s difficulty should come from its flight controls and how they are used to navigate cramped environments and avoid enemies and their attacks, but pretty much every other factor in play makes the experience worse. Convoluted crystal acquiring, a damage system where it’s hard to tell if you or the enemy is being hurt, limited fireballs encouraging less interesting play, and a rock demon guarding the diamond you’re gunning for that is fought in an unusual and frustrating manner mean that the flight controls are the least of your concern and thus not the interesting challenge the developers were likely hoping they would be. Everything else distracts from what could have been a not-too-exciting but at least decent navigational challenge, but the direction picked for the title just leaves us with a mess of a dragon game.

And so, I give Wing War for the ColecoVision…

A TERRIBLE rating. If not for the outs of easily acquired crystals in the environment, it’s very likely this could have been a completely abysmal experience, with the rock demon battle really showing just how terrible the fireball system in the game is and how poorly damage is handled in general. But by being able to essentially skip the fireball issues through easier crystal collection, you can avoid the woes of fighting regular enemies. Being able to avoid problems doesn’t count as fixing them though, and while managing flight momentum is a more interesting challenge in other games like Lunar Lander, here it just plays poorly with the other activities you must complete. If characters were more solid to avoid enemies occupying the same space as you to sap your health, that would push things into being more tolerable, but damage indication and more interesting tasks than scooping up crystals to fight a lame boss would also be important for salvaging what little potential seems to be in this game’s current design.

While no real Wing War seems to be taking place in this ColecoVision title, it does feel like one was lost. Here, a battle between a poorly made game and the player takes place, and while a player can win by grabbing the diamonds, it hardly feels like a victory due to the annoying activities required to get there.