Hijack! (Atari 8-bit)

While the Atari 400, Atari 800, Atari 1200XL, and other home computers known collectively as the Atari 8-bit family are often compared to their computer competition like the Commodore 64 instead of game consoles, some of the design sensibilities found on home systems like the Atari 2600 could still be found in the games released for this line of computers. Short arcadey experiences about retrying again and again to earn high scores definitely made the computer line feel like it shared some blood with its console counterparts, Hijack! being a game that pretty easily captures that design approach without any extra frills.

 

Hijack! has you piloting a helicopter over a constantly moving hijacked train, a group of ten V.I.P.s trapped aboard that you need to rescue with your rope ladder. The V.I.P.s will climb atop the train and run about waiting for you to reach them, but the destination you deliver them to once they do snag onto your lowered ladder is a bit odd. The end of the train is supposedly a secure carriage, so you once you have them hanging from the ladder you need to fly to the back of the train in this 2D sidescroller. Once you have successfully saved ten people (or lost a few mid-delivery without losing all of your lives) you will be bumped up to the next difficulty level, there being three in all with different hazards to worry about per stage.

All stages have two hazards in common, the first being trees that will appear as the train barrels forward. If you make contact with a tree, either with the body of the chopper or the ladder even if no one is hanging from it, you will instantly crash. Keeping up with the train is usually pretty easy since your helicopter is faster than it, but as you’re trying to lower your ladder or avoid other dangers, a tree showing up can be a surprise danger you have little time to see coming. Even odder is that trees can spawn in areas they shouldn’t be. The train is always racing to the left, but if you start flying right over the train you can see trees appear that weren’t there when it passed them earlier. Quickly you’ll learn to try and make sure you keep the view of the action a little skewed towards the left so you can see trees and fly out of danger’s way quickly if need be, that ever present threat meaning even on the lowest difficulty there is still something to worry about. Cannons far off in the background will be shooting at you in every difficulty too but their aim is pretty bad and will only really bother you if you hover in place or they just so happen to shoot where you’re flying. You’ll already be moving quite a bit since keeping up with the train while also positioning yourself just so to pick up people requires constant adjustment, but the trees at least ensure the lowest difficulty isn’t without real dangers to watch out for.

 

That first level is actually a fairly good training stage since getting down how fast to move your chopper is key to quickly grabbing the skittish V.I.P.s before they run off. Figuring out how to keep pace with the train isn’t too hard but still is a short learning process, so having the first level be somewhat simple lets you find your footing in the kind of action Hijack! features. You don’t get to pick your level when turning the game on, but luckily if you do die on level 2 or the repeating level 3 you can start from that stage to try it again. Level 2 is actually where the game is at its best as it introduces the dangerous complication of little yellow guns on the ship firing diagonally up at you. They try to fire when you’re in sight but you can bait out a shot and they’ll need time to reload afterwards. Picking your moment to try and save a V.I.P. becomes more intense as you need to balance the guns on the train, the possibility of a tree, the rare lucky shots of background cannons, and your need to be positioned correctly to match speed with a moving train. It’s a skill that will grow over time and it becomes easier to snag those V.I.P.s quickly and transport them, the speed with which you do so earning you bonus points with the slowly ticking down bonus timer resetting after each rescue.

You have five helicopters before the action wraps up and you’re offered the opportunity to continue at the current difficulty, but while you can accommodate the trees in how you fly, sometimes spawning in on a new life will put you right in front of one of the train’s yellow cannons that fire immediately and take another life. Level 2’s overall good balance in terms of difficulty is upset a little by this unfair feature, but it’s Level 3 where the game starts to run out of goodwill. Level 3 removes the restrictions on shot timing from the yellow guns, meaning you can’t really bait them or predict when they’ll fire next. This overly complicates the V.I.P. grabbing as it can depend on luck if you even can grab them, and while you won’t get any bonuses for losing a person out of the ten you need to grab, on this highest difficulty it’s hard to be too bothered that you have one less person you need to worry about delivering. The mayhem of constant unpredictable shots can make desperate dives to try and save someone a bit too much of a coin flip even if you took every precaution possible. Thankfully it’s not a constant barrage that is impossible to slip through, but inconsistency in firing rates does make this last difficulty feel more like it’s trying to clear out your remaining helicopters so you can lock in your high score rather than providing a means to keep playing.

 

This does leave Hijack! in a bit of sad spot. Level 1 is simple but decent, Level 2 is where the game is at its most enjoyable and reasonably complex, but Level 3 cranks the difficulty up too high without providing you good means for overcoming it. Level 2 is challenging even once you’ve started to acclimate to things like getting your chopper’s momentum right to match the train’s speed, but it is a bit of a shame that the prize for grabbing all 10 V.I.P.s is to be thrown into an unfair difficulty where that occasional problem with respawn deaths will be even more aggravating. If you are going for a high score though it would be reasonable to start at the very beginning and work up to that Level 3 wall rather than trying to accumulate score at that level, so once you have seen the three difficulties it can be wise to refuse the game’s offer to continue from the stage you left off on. Hijack! could have definitely kept the good times going with less extreme measures for harder stages, perhaps making those background cannons more active and threatening if the game couldn’t bring in new threats, although the shots from the background are small and can be a little hard to see until they’re an immediate danger. Still, increasing their competence would have been a better approach than making the angled yellow cannons too much of a gamble to get through, Hijack! losing some of its longevity by way of deliberate sabotage.

THE VERDICT: When Hijack! kicks off it does so quite well, its first difficulty acclimating you to the weaker worries while helping you learn how you need to move to save the people aboard the runaway train. Level 2 helps the game find its stride as the challenge is cranked up a reasonable degree to make for some exciting rescues. However, the respawn kills that make for some early game unfairness pair awfully with the final difficulty level’s already unpredictable dangers. Hijack! works well when it’s about accommodating threats while moving quickly to earn the bonus points for fast action, but Level 3 can come too quickly once you’ve built up your skill a bit and its efforts to rush you to a game over end up hampering an otherwise entertaining little action game.

 

And so, I give Hijack! for the Atari 8-bit line of computers…

An OKAY rating. Perhaps if Level 3’s less fair tricks cropped up at a Level 5 then the low possibility of hitting that wall would offset the difficult design no longer playing nice, but Level 2 is where the game briefly finds its stride and there was certainly more room for a player to keep pushing afterwards. Even simply linking together some barely altered variations on Level 2’s design would keep Hijack! entertaining longer, but Hijack! wants to let you try and overcome each difficulty level through its continue system while also having the format of a game that is meant to be played from the start each time. Level 3 feels like it’s shoving you out as if you’d be forced to start again and try to be faster in V.I.P. rescues to set a better score next time, but instead you can start from Level 3 and easily notice the game is not really trying to hide it’s shift towards less fair design with the yellow cannons. With each train car having two yellow cannons and a V.I.P. always having a chance of appearing smack dab in the middle between them you can further find yourself in a pickle that will likely lead to a death and a possible second death on respawn, but again this is all an issue with the final difficulty level rather than the main game. It can suck if you get double killed in Level 2 but having five lives makes that a bit easier to stomach, and those cannons at least usually follow some rules to prevent them from being overbearing. You can still even squeak out a few rescues on that final level with a little luck since it’s not at an overwhelmingly chaotic level, but while the first jump in difficulty from level 1 to 2 is reasonable and even pretty replayable because the movement and threats aren’t something you’ll perfectly be able to handle, Hijack!’s runaway train action stops too soon as the designers decided to move right to endgame action instead of adding a few more steps down the road.

 

Perhaps on an Atari home console Hijack! would have had game variations and the difficulty switch to better provide different versions of its core experience rather than the three on offer here, but with Hijack! starting off decent, getting good, and then turning bad in the last level, its a bit hard to fully recommend this Atari 8-bit action game. Having to consider things like how fast your vehicle moves in relation to the train means it’s hard to fully master it and the lower level’s randomization of tree placing and shot timing usually is done well to be surmountable but challenging, but it is a bit of shame to know that when you are starting to really understand the game you will reach a final level where losses are going to be more outside your control. If you want to go for a high score though, the run from Level 1 is still entertaining enough and the continue options at least let you train on Level 2, but it would be nice if players could enjoy either a level progression focused approach or a full score run depending on what suits their tastes.