SAR: Search and Rescue (Arcade)

In most first playthroughs of a video game, enemies and hazards perform their roles effectively. You may not spend much time fighting them or avoiding them, but it’s not until you potentially uncover some trick or develop a greater understanding of the game that you can skip them or outright invalidate the threat they pose. SAR: Search and Rescue, on the other hand, is designed in such a way where it’s incredibly easy to skip past many enemies with little issue, and considering the entire game takes around 15 minutes to beat, this short 1989 arcade game really couldn’t afford to so frequently allow you to skip past trouble.

 

Thankfully, even though you’ll quickly learn how easy it is to breeze past certain challenges, SAR: Search and Rescue isn’t a complete cakewalk. In this game’s story, you and potentially a second player are an investigative team sent down to take a look at a pioneer space ship that suddenly crashed on an alien world. Very quickly you realize the cause of the wreck is the absurd amount of aliens infesting the vessel, and to make sure these monstrosities never make it off world, you need to fight your way to the controls to make sure the entire spaceship is destroyed.

This simple set-up is used mostly as a way to throw a bevy of unique and strange alien types at the player. Players will encounter former crew members of the ship mutated into purplish zombies, some already split in half and desperately crawling towards you with guns they barely remember how to use. Shoot these zombies with your rapid fire machine gun that can aim in eight directions and you’ll be treated to an over the top explosion of alien gore, the viscera bursting out of them like they were a balloon full of guts that just popped. The coloration and 16-bit graphics means these aren’t very gruesome, but the entire game has a messy organic aesthetic that creeps more and more into the visuals as you get deeper into enemy territory. The ship itself is overrun with fleshy red growths, and while the enemy forces aren’t above deploying mechanical assistance to stop you like hover mechs and giant flying metal hands, most of your foes are detailed monstrosities. From aliens definitely inspired by the Xenomorph from the Alien franchise to original ideas like a green monster who melts into a puddle and rises up as a pillar to strike, the handful of enemies and bosses mix technological and organic designs in enough interesting ways that you won’t really complain about the look of what you’re fighting.

 

What does begin to become a problem though is the area design in the game. The space ship’s interior is split into long hallways and small rooms where you are meant to fight your way to the exit door, this top-down run and gun having things like falling floors you need to leap across, tight quarters where enemies can come at you from all sides, a small elevator section, and plenty of similar square rooms that serve as minor battle arenas. The problem with these though is they are generally pretty short and easily traversed, and while the game might put some big sturdy aliens or mechs near the door onward, there really is nothing stopping you from just shuffling around them and going forward. Many times you’ll be thrown into tight quarters with a group of the game’s strongest enemies, but the exit door is still incredibly easy to reach, the player seemingly foolish if they stay and fight the foes in the room. Too often the best option in an area is to not engage with all the enemies coming at you, and since your regular gun clears away the abundant weak enemies well enough, you’re not exactly being challenged on the way to the door too often. You can’t even say this was some unintentional exploit, the game frequently having an arrow pop up to indicate the direction the door is in to try and funnel you to the exit when you’re trying to stay behind and actually fight.

There are two special weapon pick-ups you can find along the way, as well as one that will revert you back to your default gun if you so wish. One gun provides a stronger fireball machine gun, while the second new weapon type will periodically launch a missile at wherever you were pointing the reticle at the time. The missile weapon still lets you fire a regular machine gun in between launches so it doesn’t limit your ability to hold off waves of enemies who often use numbers over interesting abilities to be a threat, but the fact you die in one hit isn’t too much of a worry during regular play. The guns have special abilities you can activate with a little charge, the fireball gun having a shield that is good to use when plowing through foes or facing off with the bosses who you can’t just walk past to get to the door. The missile launcher though is surprisingly powerful with its charge power. Rather than launching a missile, the charged version of this gun will drop a miniature black hole on the ground, and the reach of this gravity well is shocking. Not only will most weak enemies on screen be sucked up into it and die instantly, but many foes who are still offscreen will be pulled in as well, and there’s little stopping you from repeatedly firing the black holes as you march through to the next door. Big enemies resist it, but you still have your machine gun shots to rely on, and if you have a second player, it’s fairly easy for the other gunner to cover the foes the black hole doesn’t swallow.

 

While in many games I lament the fact a death takes an interesting power-up away, the fact SAR: Search and Rescue lets you keep your weapon until you run out of lives seems almost too kind. So long as you don’t accidentally grab a weaker option, you can breeze through many rooms on the spaceship with black holes or charging towards the exit door, and since this is a game that’s more expensive to play if you die, avoiding more quarter use is a natural part of the game design. There are some side paths to explore and you can technically linger to battle aliens for points, but the game hardly encourages this or really makes the task all too interesting. The bosses and some rooms at least find ways to prevent you from being too effective. You’ll have to stand and fight the bosses with fair gun use, and some like the Devil Worm are large and require you to be alert or you will lose lives to it movements and shots. Areas with crumbling floors or other gimmicks like tons of flying hands also ask for you to get around trouble instead of invalidating it with the black hole or charging the door, but even the fights with the big bosses are fairly short in this game that goes by too quickly even if played without any tricks. The good news is that nothing is really grating in its design and most enemies who are tough can be conquered with proper play instead of your overpowered weaponry, but so little of your already short time with this game gives you something to sink your teeth into, leaving the game a frankly unmemorable experience.

THE VERDICT: Visceral alien shooting in a ship packed with things eager to kill you could have made SAR: Search and Rescue at least a decent run and gun title, but the game undermines the designs of its rooms and enemies by making it easy to defeat most of them and run past most of the others. The black hole charged shot invalidates so many of the foes who rely on horde tactics to make a mark, and the fact many rooms can be cleared by walking around enemies to reach the door means even some of the more striking strong foes are wasted designs. Bosses can sometimes ask you to truly stand and fight and a few areas in the spaceship require you to engage with a gimmick, but this incredibly short arcade game is built to be a quick and unsatisfactory rush to completion because it doesn’t know how to properly limit your power.

 

And so, I give SAR: Search and Rescue for arcade machines…

A BAD rating. Tone down the strength of the black hole charge shot and make it so you can only pass through doors after completing some sort of combat requirement and SAR: Search and Rescue could at least be more than a blur of blowing apart aliens with your gun. However, even just a few lingering moments of skippable content in SAR: Search and Rescue would strain an already brisk and all too simple experience. There’s not too much going on in general, but at least most of it doesn’t outright bother the player because very few moments have the impact needed to potentially interfere with the forward dash to the end. The small amount of weapon pick-ups and limited enemy designs already make this game feel rather thin, but having so many of your engagements with them be optional or far too easily overcome with a weapon that’s not even rare leaves SAR: Search and Rescue a forgettable and empty experience. The game barely has the time to register in the player’s mind before it’s shown you the ending and sent you on your way, but being mostly inoffensive does mean it’s not really worthy of harsher criticism.

 

With just a bit more substance behind the alien combat and how foes are placed, SAR: Search and Rescue could have been a more exciting run and gun, but it instead gives the player too much control over the pace they progress at and the power they bring to bear. Even with the player’s one-hit deaths it doesn’t feel like it’s putting up too much of a fight since you can keep avoiding most battles along the adventure. Ultimately, its low quality mostly comes from how shallow and uneventful the game feels like as a result. There’s very little reason to search out a way to play this bite-sized SNK arcade title.