Air Fortress (NES)

Usually, an 8-bit NES game will try to do one type of gameplay and do it well. If it’s a space shooter, you’ll spend the whole game inside that spaceship shooting aliens, and if it’s a platformer, you can expect to be hopping around levels until you reach the final stage. However, there were some games that tried to provide a hybrid genre experience, and here is where most people familiar with retro games would expect a transition into talking about Blaster Master or perhaps Guardian Legend. While those are the better known cases of a game that constantly goes back and forth between two genres, there is actually a game for the NES that predates them both, HAL Laboratory’s Air Fortress alternating between sidescrolling space shooter play and run and gun action platforming.

The Planet Farmel is a planet that has just begun to really push into advanced space travel, but while doing so, they come across eight massive space stations drifting about space. Supposedly alive despite seeming to be made of advanced technology, these stations, known as Air Fortresses, travel the galaxy and destroy worlds so they can feed on the remains. The Air Fortresses immediately turn their sights on Farmel and the planet sends out its best armadas to intercept them, but the Air Fortress easily destroy them. With no alternatives left, a man named Hal Bailman climbs into a special craft known as the Lightship and aims to infiltrate the eight fortresses, destroy their cores, and save his home planet from utter destruction.

Taking down an Air Fortress consists of two major portions, one where the player must fly the Lightship safely to an entry point and then a labyrinthine interior where the player guides the astronaut about in search of the core that must be destroyed. The Lightship segments are certainly the easier portion of the game, the sidescrolling shooting actually not as focused on survival as it might be if it was a game’s main focus. Instead, the spaceship segments are perhaps more important for the pick-ups you grab as you make your way to the station. While you have a few lives in the Lightship, you only have one when you’re playing as the astronaut. A password system will allow you to get back to the Air Fortress you left off on, but some Air Fortresses will literally be impossible if you do poorly at the spaceship segments. While flying in the Lightship, you will spot the letters E and B floating about, these providing energy and Crash Beam blasts respectively. Energy increases the max health Hal will have on foot, and the Crash Beam is essentially a more powerful shot that is key to taking down stronger enemies and actually defeating the fortress’s core.

In the first few fortresses, the flight segments aren’t too challenging and it’s mostly about avoiding running into environmental pieces or swarms of enemies as you try to maximize the items you pick up. Eventually though, these areas do pick up in difficulty considerably, and since a single bit of contact with anything will blow up the Lightship, the fact big groups of enemies fly in and fire multiple shots at once can sometimes leave you in a bind. Enemy craft with weird flight patterns or ones that react to how you’re moving about will start to really test your flight skills, but there are some scenarios where you will die if you weren’t in the right spot when a certain enemy type flies onto screen. The jump in challenge coupled with moments where foreknowledge is required to avoid dooming yourself with a seemingly innocuous position begin to sour these portions late into the adventure. Some helpful items like a screen clearing pick-up or brief invincibility can be satisfying to grab in these chaotic levels, but while you can find some enjoyment when the enemies aren’t going overboard with their aggression, you’ll mostly be either playing against pushover spacecraft or ridiculously strong onslaughts during your time in the Lightship.

Once you pop out of your spaceship and head into the Air Fortress, you thankfully aren’t fully locked into the amount of Energy and Crash Beam charges you entered with. Enemies can sometimes drop boosts for these and a few are placed that reliably drop them as well, which is fortunate because Energy isn’t just tied to your health. Getting around inside the Air Fortress is slow on foot, but with use of a jetpack you can fly around the interior. The jetpack will gradually reduce your total energy while it is in use, but coming to a stop on the ground will cause it to quickly refill. If you’re firing your regular beam attack or even just slowly shuffling across the floor though you won’t get your power back, so navigating the space station is about managing your energy well so that you’re never in combat with only a tiny bit of health left.

Contact with an enemy or their projectile fire will reduce not only your current energy, but the total amount you can heal up to by resting in place. The unfortunate truth of this is that the game knows you’ll be coming into an Air Fortress with a fairly high amount of life, and thus it doesn’t always play fair. There are moments where getting hit is entirely unavoidable. There are plenty of areas where you need to do blind drops and will be fired on before you can flee, rooms you enter where the entrance disappear and enemies are quickly upon you, and situations where you’re in a space where there just isn’t enough room to feasibly fly about and dodge. For the most part, the game will make sure the unavoidable threats also dish out only a bit of damage, it sometimes surprising to see how little energy you actually lost after something like a little jumping walker sprayed you with a large spray of shots. On the other hand, some enemies deliver absurdly high amounts of damage for what they are, the little flying orbs with flame jets shaving huge chunks out of your energy reserves on contact and certain colors of enemy spacemen can blast you to bits in an instant. These hard hitters are pretty persistent in chasing you too, so it’s not unusual to enter a room with a healthy amount of life and suddenly find it all gone thanks to an unexpected encounter with these deceptively deadly threats.

Like the Lightship portions, the early game is almost too easy, Hal likely having so many reserves you can play sloppily. However, then it inverts and even a huge amount will not avail you, but this is where the game has the good sense to start tossing more Energy at you during the platforming portions. This doesn’t erase that the difficulty often relies on guaranteed damage or areas that are a poor fit for evading an overpowered foe, but you can eventually learn the lay of the space station and know what to anticipate when entering one of the more dangerous areas. However, the lay of the space station gets more complex with each new Air Fortress, the branching paths and red herrings growing in number to the point that you come to accept you won’t find the core in your first few runs in a new layout. The core itself is usually easy to destroy at least, usually supported by some pesky enemies but the fight can end quickly if you have enough Crash Beams. Crash Beams can be required elsewhere though, some blocks only broken by them and the game being outright cruel in how it places some of these.

After you’ve destroyed an Air Fortress’s core, you must then escape by finding where your Lightship is. Inexplicably it’s not where you entered, and like other aspects of the game, it gets more and more complex and convoluted the later in the game you are. Sometimes you’ll need to explore a whole new section of the Air Fortress to find the way off the space station, and if you aren’t quick enough in doing it, the fortress will explode and you’ll die along with it. Placing Crash Beam blocks in front of the ship is the ultimate moment of Air Fortress being harsh with the player as this limited resource can be hard to hold onto. Many of the toughest enemies or roadblocks on the way through the Air Fortress are best handled by blowing them apart immediately with one Crash Beam shot. Fighting them with your regular laser can take a long time and the more dangerous foes can often hit you plenty of times if you rely on your weaker weapon. Oddly enough, some enemies who are killed in an area will stay dead, meaning you can clear a path to the ship first, but others will respawn the moment the area they appear in goes off screen, spacemen especially being a case of something that does this and thus making them even more dangerous.

Air Fortress is definitely a game you’ll need to learn through a few losses in the later levels, and figuring out how to succeed when things aren’t being deliberately harsh can be rewarding. Once you get to the final fortress and destroy it though, the game asks you to repeat your adventure in a second harder quest. The map layouts will be the same for the interior portions, but enemies and the locations of the cores and escape ship will be shifted around to make it more challenging. Unsurprisingly for a game of this era, the difference between the regular ending and the ending to the second harder loop through the game is a different paragraph of text on screen, this retooling of the fortresses just an artificial means of lengthening the experience. Needless to say the harder versions of the stages crank up many of the problems, but it feels more like an unlockable hard mode for an already difficult game rather than a continuation of the adventure and story that needs to be seen.

THE VERDICT: Air Fortress’s genre mix of space shooter and run and gun platformer does start off promising if a bit easy, but before it can find its sweet spot, the game begins its decline into frustration. If you play the first few fortresses you can find a game that challenges your ability to explore a dangerous space station and manage your resources, but the game eventually stops playing fair and throws harsh enemies and guaranteed hits into the mix. Late game area design gives the player less and less of a fighting chance, and while learning the game can let you eventually overcome its lethal ambushes, the final fortresses are soured by the imbalance in enemy effectiveness compared to the strength Hal Bailman brings to the table.

And so, I give Air Fortress for the Nintendo Entertainment System…

A BAD rating. If we include the second quest here it would definitely be a rating lower as the problems grow too prevalent, but the first run through Air Fortress can have its moments before it stops playing nice. The generosity of the password system is one of the few things that keeps the lethality and unfairness of certain moments in the late game from completely killing the experience, but it’s a shame the game starts to rely so heavily on enemies and hazards that crowd a vulnerable player and necessitate damage or Crash Beam usage. There’s nothing wrong with Crash Beam use being a weighty decision, but having moments that require it despite the shortage and enemies who can wipe away hundreds of units of energy in seconds if they’re not killed quickly really strains the idea behind holding onto that powerful shot type. Rather than having so many mobile and incredibly powerful threats, Air Fortress would likely better be served by reliable enemy types and behaviors the player can learn and account for but become difficult to handle thanks to their placement or other enemies they’re paired up with. Instead, you can drop down a shaft or be thrown in a room where you have to throw yourself into one sort of damage to avoid a worse one. Most of these problems are definitely found in the platforming sections, with the Lightship mostly just needing fewer foes who appear and fire too quickly to dodge in some specific scenarios, but the longer interior segments are certainly the game’s bigger focus and the area that definitely needs to rein in how high the difficulty is cranked near the end of the adventure.

Air Fortress is sadly not a good example of how to do a genre mix and it’s not really the fault of trying to tackle two game types in the same experience. Instead, HAL Laboratory’s flawed way of increasing the difficulty really sours the later stages of the adventure. It can be a fun and decently challenging experience if you turn the game off after only a few fortresses, but Air Fortress’s little problems grow into overbearing flaws if you stick with it.