Gain Ground (Genesis/Mega Drive)

To justify bringing together warriors and soldiers from the past, present, and future to battle each other, Gain Ground came up with quite an interesting science fiction idea that is unfortunately mostly relegated to the manual. Set in the year 3000, humanity has achieved a utopic existence free of war and strife. However, fearing that they might not be ready should conflict ever arise again, the governments of earth create the Gain Ground system that allows people to simulate battle. Unfortunately the system goes haywire and begins trapping the people who use it inside, subsequent rescue attempts only leading to more people locked into the simulation. A final band of three is put together, and should they fail, the Gain Ground system will instead be terminated, the fate of those still inside after unclear.

 

To take down the Gain Ground system essentially involves beating it at its own game, the conflicts represented by top-down battles where the enemy is already in position and you and potentially another player must move in and try to either take out every troop on the battlefield or make it to the exit with all of your own characters. The journey takes place across fifty levels split between five time periods, eras like the Middles Ages, the present, and what the player would consider the future all cropping up and the opposing forces are all equipped with weapons appropriate to their time. Going up against men with blades and bows in the far past or dodging bullets and grenades in the present makes a good deal of sense and ensures some built-in variety to the type of enemies you have to fight your way through, but the game does get a bit fanciful with what it is willing to put in its stages. The future stages get a pass since they of course haven’t happened yet, but some levels representing the real world’s past will have oddities like giant monstrous worms emerging from the sand to attack. Leaning into fiction benefits you as well though, the player able to recruit a samurai who can unleash whirlwinds and a knight who can surround themselves with fireballs, and with everything happening within a computer simulation it can technically be as fanciful as it wants. Still, the game whips out the imaginary less often than it embraces more realistic warriors for the time period, the player still getting to set up the situation of bringing a spear thrower to fight gunmen or firing rockets back in medieval times.

Gain Ground’s main feature is the selection of twenty characters you can play as, the game starting you off with three but many levels will feature presumably one of the people who went in before you now held captive by enemy forces. If you can safely get to the character and escort them to a small exit zone they’ll join your forces in the next level, the player gradually growing a small army with a range of powers to bring to battle. Most characters have distinct normal and special attacks, someone like Webad the archer able to fire normal arrow shots quickly with his standard fire but able to lob an arrow up and over barriers with his special fire. Some characters unfortunately do get the short end of the stick, Jonny’s rifle firing fairly weak shots and his special just being a forward shot with no difference, but this design choice is subtly genius. During a stage of Gain Ground you will be entering an area where the enemy has the advantage, they are entrenched behind barriers and certain enemies can survive multiple hits from standard weaponry. You do have to gain ground to get in there and start taking them down and all of your heroes will be taken out in a single hit, but luckily there is a little hope if someone is taken out. The last hero who took damage will be left where they fell and can be rescued in a manner similar to recruiting new members, but they’ll disappear if you end up losing another hero before saving them. Where the intelligent bit of design comes into play is that there are moments where you might realize a sacrifice might be the easiest way to clear out some of the enemy troops, their numbers finite in every level. Sending in a more expendable troop ends up a strategic choice, and since you can only play as one troop at a time, there can be a good deal of thought put into who you want to send out into a battlefield to potentially scout out enemy strategies or set things up for a stronger character.

Here is where more specialized units can start to come in handy too. Mud Harry is abysmally slow but one of the few characters who packs a weapon that can travel the full length of the screen, each battlefield a fixed space with no scrolling so he can control a good deal of a conflict provided he’s not at risk himself. Some levels have many enemies stationed on battlements or rooftops so you need to make sure you have a character who can hit people in higher positions, although that does lead to the concern that you can lose enough warriors in other levels you could technically get to an unwinnable scenario. You would have had to knowingly risk people who have unique abilities though and thankfully if you choose to continue if you do get in a Game Over scenario you will be given the default heroes who at least technically can handle every battle even if they’re not necessarily the best picks for it. One oddity though is you can get duplicates of characters on a run, but this can at least mean you have a chance to potentially come across one of the better characters again if you lost them earlier.

 

There is a small disadvantage to growing your group’s size, and that comes down to the win conditions of each level. To beat a level you must either wipe out every enemy soldier or have all of your heroes make it to the marked exits, and once you starting getting a pretty hearty band of heroes, having each one of them march their way to the exit is a bit of a process. Levels are timed and running out of it will let you continue on but actually rob you of many of your troops, but thankfully the condensed size of most stages means that wiping out the entire enemy force is fairly doable. There are definitely levels where it is much riskier, especially since, even though you are told how many enemies are in a stage, some will arrive only as back-ups once you reach certain parts of the battlefield and that can lead to deadly ambushes. Boss stages are also special in that they must be completed by defeating all enemies, these stages lacking exits so you can’t even save any fallen heroes on your side to emphasize a different approach to how you value your troops. The game’s Hard mode has a more interesting twist though, because rather than making the opposition tougher, it is instead more of a challenge run where you start off with every possible character on your side to start with but you have no continues and there is no chance to recruit any more heroes. Playing through Gain Ground normally already has an interesting strategic slant, but changing how you view even your least useful unit on Hard mode adds a new challenging and tactical layer to a game that already made you think about more than just pointing your characters at enemies and opening fire.

THE VERDICT: Gain Ground may look simple at first as you fire upon swordsmen in the far past, but as your own army grows and you experience your own losses, the strategic underbelly of this top-down action game reveals itself to be an entertaining and thoughtful twist to the already interesting idea of mixing together warriors from different time periods. Figuring out how to best utilize unique skill sets, who works as an acceptable loss, making desperate runs to get a fallen hero to the exit so they can be revived, and facing off with a wide range of enemies to boot all mixes together well so its single screen battles are more robust than they initially seem.

 

And so, I give Gain Ground for Sega Genesis/Mega Drive…

A GOOD rating. While there is strategic value to having the less exciting troops on your side you’re willing to risk to scout out the capabilities of new enemies or trigger possible ambushes, Gain Ground could have been more entertaining if its batch of twenty were all capable in their own right and more consistently unique. Two boomerang throwers, two spearmen, and many characters who have the same pistol as their basic or special fire does make the field a little less diverse, but there are still enough characters with clear niches and with the penalty for being hit once being to lose a unit, it’s not actually bad to have a slightly worse version of a capable hero you can send in if you are concerned by how those robots are moving or how clustered together the enemy gunmen are. Giving you two ways to clear a stage can help alleviate the pressure if your forces are dwindling, merely making a safe path to the exit a valid tactic but eliminating all foes often not outside the realm of possibility because the opposing troops are varied but not often overly durable. Their advantages come in numbers and positioning mostly and figuring out how to get in there and thin their ranks without losing your forces is often as important as firing your character’s weapon of choice, and since there’s only two attack types to worry about per character you won’t spend too long mulling things over and possibly running up against that fairly generous timer. Hard mode also deserves praise for its commendable approach of not going the easy route by cranking up enemy numbers or strength but instead providing a unique twist for people who conquer the main game, the game further cultivating the tactical approach to the top-down shooting that gives this game it an interesting level of depth.

 

The Gain Ground system in the underexplored story actually is pretty good at its job of helping train you to become better at battle, the player needing to understand the dangers and risks they face and choose the appropriate character for the job from what’s available. They’ll need to adjust strategies based on unexpected occurrences and can feel the price of bad judgment calls. The game doesn’t reach the intricate layers of thought required for true grand strategy and real-time strategy games, but as an extra layer placed over a specific type of top-down shooter, Gain Ground’s tactical elements give it the extra bit of life it needs to be a more advanced top-down action game.