Guerrilla War (Arcade)

SNK has quite the reputation for unfair arcade game design, many of its games featuring characters who die in one hit to force players to put in more quarters and others outright reading your button inputs to have the bosses outmaneuver you in the way only a computer can. Players still played them though, some because of the excellent graphics on show or because the cheap pocket-draining tactics only cropped up late into the action, but there are games like the Metal Slug series that manage to balance high difficulty with rewarding action despite how easy it is to die. This is why for a while I was unsure how much of SNK’s reputation was well earned, and while games like Ghost Pilots were a brush with their tactics, Guerrilla War is the game that cemented in my mind that SNK was sometimes far more concerned with just getting your cash rather than providing a fun experience.

 

Guerrilla War is a top down run and gun shooter that carries over many of the ideas from SNK’s better known run and gun game Ikari Warriors. However, Guerrilla War probably has the more interesting history to it because its Japanese version is based on real people. While in the U.S. the game has unnamed Guerrilla soldiers attacking the army of a despotic king on an unknown Caribbean island, the Japanese version dispenses with any vagueness and outright has the island be Cuba, Batista as the dictator, and Fidel Castro and Che Guevara as the two playable characters fighting in this attempted coup. In fact, the game is even known as Guevara in Japan. While stripping out the real world elements was likely a wise marketing decision for its Western release, it is a shame they didn’t take the extra steps a game like Warriors of Fate did in providing a new fictional backstory for it, the action instead loosely held together by the generic ideas of a guerrilla war happening on a tropical island.

The translation changes are perhaps the most interesting part of this title unfortunately. The actual task of overthrowing either Batista or the unnamed king involves you running into enemy territory, the vertically scrolling screen not having much horizontal room for movement. This is a restriction you will feel constantly during your short adventure, many parts of the jungle and cities you pass through tightening the corridor for travel so that you’re very limited in how you can move ahead. This wouldn’t be too much of an issue if you were equipped for such tight spaces, but even though you’re able to aim all around you and your basic weapon’s infinite fire can clear out basic soldiers easily, the soldiers will often run in and quickly fire, appear from the trees or buildings you can’t move into, and can even come from behind with their guns ready to shoot you dead. It takes one shot of any type to down one of your freedom fighters, and since a quarter only grants you three lives, you can quickly see those disappear as you find yourself confined in a space with enemy fire coming from all sides. On revival you rush back in with brief invincibility, but the way it throws you back into that tight spot can lead to a domino effect of deaths if you can’t break free of the cycle. You can earn extra lives by getting enough points, rescuing hostages being a way to earn them but shooting them will detract from your score. Lives are lost so quickly though that it’s more happy coincidence one is earned than something that can be actively pursued unless you’ve got a huge degree of foreknowledge or memorization to rely on for success.

 

There are special weapon pick-ups that boost your gun’s strength and capabilities. Tougher enemies will go down pretty easily to the flaming and explosive shots you pick up, and many levels have obstructions that can be destroyed with these weapon options. The fifty grenades you get in a life are meant to break through barriers that often obstruct your ability to shoot foes while they easily fire on you with things like mortars, but you need to be positioned properly to hit the barriers with your grenades. Since some enemies will put down new barriers and others might force you into a region of the screen where you can’t target the blockades well, you might find yourself dying because you have no good way to open the path forward. Enemy overload and limited moving space is a constant issue since the baddies can sprout up from anywhere and their weapons have such good reach. Trying to predict where a soldier might suddenly appear from to fire on you is inevitably a guessing game, a player having to get used to the ambushes and movement traps to have any hope of playing through in any other manner than just feeding more quarters to continue.

The game is short and during that time it doesn’t get so ridiculous that you never spend time being completely outgunned, but there are many cases where you might walk into a situation and have to learn the troubles ahead by being shot apart by them. Tank enemies are very durable and can’t just be dispatched by blindly firing forward and some soldiers run towards you to basically eat your bullets so others can take you down, but despite the slog that is pushing through the bloated waves of regular enemies, the bosses actually come out quite decent. Since most boss fights focus on one large enemy firing bullets or other weapons in a very specific manner, you’re actually able to see the shots coming and respond appropriately, taking opportunities to hit the vehicles or characters you face in these battles while still having a fair shot at surviving. Some like the final boss pretty much expect to land an easy kill or two on you before you have had time to identify what’s really going on in the fight, but these are much easier to tolerate because the playing field isn’t so heavily tipped towards waves of enemies that can’t even be handled well with two players.

 

The last thing that keeps this from being just constant suffering through barely avoidable attacks is the tank you can commandeer. Packing the powerful shot of your regular weapons but increasing your durability so you can take some hits without instantly dying and losing those helpful tools, the tank is a brief moment of more balanced play as you can weather the numbers disadvantage better and retaliate without having to watch every possible avenue of attack so closely. These can be quickly destroyed still because you’ll likely eat a lot of fire no matter how well you’re doing, but a mild respite from the unforgiving nature of regular enemy skirmishes still means these tanks are a welcome sight when they crop up. Like the boss battles they are far too short to make up for the rest of the game’s generally annoying design, but it is nice when poorly designed difficulty gives you a break for a bit.

THE VERDICT: With far too much practice and memorization, it is possible to do well at the arcade version of Guerrilla War, but having suffer to through the imbalanced difficulty, enemy ambush tactics, and hard to avoid deaths to get to even just a basic level of tolerable playability does not make Guerrilla War’s design acceptable. The truth is it wanted your quarters and littered the game with opportunities to catch you in a bind or shoot you when you barely have the chance to respond, and while it can give you some mild enjoyment when driving the tank or when engaged in a decent boss battle, the experience mostly involves being blindsided by enemies from all sides with no chance to adequately handle the dangers ahead unless you already know they’re going to be there.

 

And so, I give Guerrilla War for arcade machines…

A TERRIBLE rating. While I have heard the NES port of this game is far better despite looking like a downgraded version of this game, it’s easy to see that even some small changes to Guerrilla War would do so much to help with its enjoyability. The sheer quantity of foes and firepower coming your way in restrictive vertical levels is definitely meant to kill players quickly, and cranking that dial down even just a bit would make things automatically less aggravating. There are areas where you do get more room to move and some fights where you don’t need to know what’s ahead to survive, but it’s hard to enjoy them when you’re constantly losing lives and power-ups during most of the experience. You won’t ever truly be stonewalled, but that’s because quarters will allow you to keep pushing forward no matter how poorly enemies are laid out or how ill equipped your character is for handling them.

 

Guerrilla War may technically be possible to beat without dying after you know the game in and out, but it doesn’t really justify that degree of devotion. Playing it regularly is going to have constant moments where even a careful player is going to be killed by something they didn’t have much of an answer for, and even if you did strip away the bad enemy placement and tight quarters, your interaction with most of the enemy force is incredibly basic. The bosses and tanks, the highlights of the experience, aren’t even exceptional but stand out for not relying on the otherwise omnipresent aggressive tactics SNK thought up to get as many quarters as they thought they could get from an unsuspecting player.