Abadox: The Deadly Inner War (NES)

For a pretty typical side-scrolling shoot ’em up, Abadox: The Deadly Inner War sets up quite the intense backstory for its action. Abadox, which is the name of your home planet, is already completely consumed by an enormous alien entity called Parasitis before the game has even started. The survivors of Parasitis’s attack tried to lead an offensive against the now planet-sized monstrosity, but they too are decimated and their princess is integrated into the monstrous mass. Only one person survived the destruction of the planet and its military, the player put in the boots of Second Lieutenant Nazal as he flies in to try and destroy Parasitis on his own. He has no hope of saving his home planet, only hoping that he can save the princess and kill the cosmic creature before more worlds fall to its hunger.

You wouldn’t know any of this unless you read the manual or the back of the box though. Like many early video games, Abadox: The Deadly Inner War’s gameplay just tosses you right into the action with only vague scenes to establish what you are doing. While the set-up is certainly bleak, it does set up quite the world for our adventure to take place in. The infected planet of Abadox is now almost 100% organic mass, and while you will eventually find some technological areas deep within the insides of Parasitis, most of your adventure carries you through the fleshy interior of an unusual alien. It’s difficult to identify exactly what kind of internal organs make up the walls and background of areas you fly through, most of it looking more like ground meat than something from a digestive tract. Still, it certainly sells the idea of being inside an enormous alien creature, the game even managing to be colorful with the internal organ design so that it’s not endless reds, browns, and oranges as you might expect.  Environmental hazards are a bit easier to place as body parts, with bones poking out of walls, a giant tongue sitting in your path at one point, and zit-like cannons firing at you. Most of the enemies can fall pretty well into being conceivably connected to Parasitis, floating eyeballs, fleshy gut flora, and plenty of mishmashes of meat and body parts serving as the most common types of enemies found within, with the technological area broadening the scope a bit with more mechanical monsters as well. Bosses are even meant to seem like parts of the whole, some basically being faces in a wall and even the more humanoid or unusual designs seeming to have some connection to the greater organic mass. Not everything is flying eyeballs and giant cells though, with even the first level just pitting some purple pterodactyls against you for no obvious reason. Abadox: The Deadly Inner War does seem to realize its enemy and level designs are its strength though, so across the game’s six stages, it does keep showing you new ideas to try and keep the player interested in continuing.

Speaking of the stages, Abadox: The Deadly Inner War plays a lot like Gradius, copying many of the space shooter’s design elements for its gameplay. What it does do differently is how its levels are presented. In a level of Abadox: The Deadly Inner War, you can fly Nazal around anywhere you like on screen, pressing the fire button to use what begins as a fairly weak gun. The stages of the game are almost evenly divided between two different styles of play though. The first mode you’ll encounter is an automatically scrolling left to right affair, enemies flying in from the right that you have to deal with to survive. Every other level though, Nazal plunges deeper into the bowels of Parasitis, the levels now taking on a vertical orientation where you start at the top of the screen and the action pushes you down deeper and deeper automatically. Besides always aiming right in the horizontal stages and always aiming down in the vertical stages, the different level types control pretty similarly so you won’t be too disoriented by the constant shifts in level orientation.

That gimmickry doesn’t really push it too far away from its Gradius inspired design though. When you begin, Nazal is both weak and slow, and while the game does ease you in with the first level, it’s not really a state that’s enjoyable to be in. As you play though, blue enemies the game calls scorpions fly towards you not to attack you, but to serve as vessels for power-ups. Blast a scorpion open and you’ll find something helpful inside. There are some passive upgrades like speed ups, shielding to let you take damage without dying, and small shields that will spin around your character to block shots, and while these aren’t as exciting as the weapon power-ups the scorpions can drop, they are certainly just as important as a single hit will kill you in this game. The weapons are incredibly welcome upgrades to the peashooter you start off with. Split shots, huge rings, missiles, and lasers can all be added to your weapon, some of them even working together to let you cover tons of the screen with your weapon fire and take out most enemies quite easily. Having a beefed up weapon and plenty of defenses can make for quite the enjoyable power trip, but I mentioned an important detail of the game that makes the potential of Abadox: The Deadly Inner War crash down: you get killed by one shot.

If anything touches you in this game and you don’t have the shielding to save yourself, you’re toast. It can be touching an enemy, a biological bullet, or the increasingly claustrophobic walls of Parasitis’s insides that does it, but no matter how it happens, you’ll be thrown back to the start of the current section of the game after death. If you’re armed to the teeth, you can usually hold back the waves of enemies coming towards you well enough, but there’s a complication here, and that comes in the fact that when something does slip through your defenses and end you, all your power-ups are gone. Enemies can perhaps be overly aggressive to compensate for your potential to be incredibly strong, meaning that while you are shooting screen-filling bullet sprays, they would likely fill the screen if you aren’t the one doing it. This complicates matters when you are reset back to your weakest state, moving slowly along with an anemic gun that is just barely able to take common enemies down. Surprisingly, it’s the bosses that come with the kindest designs to a player who has been reduced to such a state, many of them taking time to beat with the worst weapon but having predictable patterns and attacks that are easy to learn and dodge. Interestingly enough, if you do come to these fights with good weapons, they can end surprisingly quickly, especially if you can find a spot to fly in and rapid fire shots into their weak point before the battle’s even really begun. It definitely makes keeping the power-ups through the gauntlet that is the bulk of the stage feel incredibly rewarding.

The levels before the boss battles aren’t quite as accommodating though, some even having what amount to traps that aim to kill you as their means of teaching you what they do. One instance of this in particular stands out, as a giant crusher exists that will be an instant kill if you’re inside it, the only way to move on is through it, and it’s large enough to dominate the entire screen at one point so you have no choice but to spend some time in it. You need to learn when it’s safe to move through it while under attack by other things that will kill you for moving carelessly, so the crusher will likely take some lives from you before you know just how to approach it. Continues mercifully let you start at the current level rather than forcing a Game Over on you, but the threat of death is so omnipresent that you’re bound to be thrown into your weak and uninteresting state far too often.

Another odd complication to the game is that, even when you are teeming with weapons and defenses, the game manages to gain an edge against you because, between your many shot types and the amount of enemies it throws at you, the game will begin to chug. Slow down and movement lag will mean you have to overcompensate in your movement to achieve your intended dodges, but once you’ve cleared the screen of enough enemies, things will abruptly speed up back to normal, making it easy to slam yourself into a wall by accident. This is at its worst against some late-game homing fireballs that are both dangerous and impose the frame lag on you, but they’re thankfully one of the few culprits of what amounts to a small but blatant footprint on the game experience as a whole. Abadox: The Deadly Inner War could have survived many of these problems though if it didn’t hit the same problem other space shoot ’em ups hit around this era, that being the experience was stretched out by making you learn the levels rather than just giving you more content to play through.

THE VERDICT: By implementing one-hit kills and making you incredibly weak at the start of each new life, Abadox: The Deadly Inner War is trying to make its six stage structure last longer by forcing you to stick around a while in each level. If you started with even the most basic of speed power-ups or a slightly better weapon, it might be more enjoyable to keep pushing against this type of difficulty, but instead you’re punished with a worse way to play until you manage to find a scorpion who can make things enjoyable and interesting again. Even without the absurd combinations of attack types, just having a bit more power makes it into a fun sidescrolling shoot ’em up with interesting new designs for the monsters and areas inside the giant alien Parasitis that bring with them new challenges and new visuals. The enjoyment of this internal world is hampered though by a game that is all too eager to punish the player for even the smallest mistake with boring play tipped heavily in failure’s favor.

And so, I give Abadox: The Deadly Inner War for the Nintendo Entertainment System…

A BAD rating. Another victim of the Gradius school of shoot ’em up design, satisfying power ups that make the game enjoyable are too readily thrown out to try and force the player to get better at a game that doesn’t earn that level of personal motivation. Placed at the start of progressively harder stages with little to work with leads to a chain reaction of repeated deaths where power can’t be built up properly, too much of the game turning up its dials to deal with the overpowered state you can enter and thus making a player who enters with less than an absurd arsenal ill-prepared to continue. If you do manage to snag just enough to build up what should be your baseline of power though, things become a credible and engaging challenge, and then once you do get the power-ups that make you incredibly powerful, it’s satisfying not to have to worry too much about what once gave you quite a bit of trouble. That can’t quite erase the memories of butting your head against things in the hope you’ll be able to grab the power-ups you need to be fit for facing the game’s design, the game’s eagerness to kill you putting you in that bland vulnerable state too often to cherish the moments where the level and enemy design does come together well.

Abadox: The Deadly Inner War, despite the work put into its setting and creatures, fails to deliver on a shooter worthy of that effort.