Fire Attack (Game & Watch)

Game & Watch LCD handhelds are meant to be simple pick up and play games where you can glean all you need to know just by looking at the the system, so it might be strange to hear any of them had a premise that could make some people uneasy. Fire Attack has you play as the sole defender of a fort that a group of raiders are trying to burn down, but the attackers take the form of Native Americans wearing traditional feather headdresses. While there is some precedent for war bonnets being worn during battle, they also can have greater cultural significance beyond that, meaning it might not sit well with some people to see someone wearing one get bonked on the head with an oversized mallet. Nintendo hasn’t tried to ignore Fire Attack though, as later rereleases and references do exist but simply elect to remove the feather-bearing headwear to make it a bit more palatable to all audiences.

“In the days of the pioneers a fort is under attack. Attackers come armed with torches and attempt to set fire to the fort. Operate the lone soldier to defend the fort.” These are the only words used to describe the set up for Fire Attack’s action in its manual, the game already skirting any potential discussion about why this place may be under attack. All we do know is that single soldier is in charge of the entire defense, standing above the fort’s gate with only a large hammer to protect the place with. Over the course of play, attackers can appear in one of four locations, the two appearing on cliff faces electing to toss their torches towards the fort while down below attackers wielding burning sticks try to approach the fort on foot. While your goal is to protect the building itself, if you do fail and a flame manages to make it safely towards your standing point, it seems the place can be saved from being set ablaze a few times. After putting out the flames, the soldier will get back up to his position to once again try and snuff out torches or knock back people climbing from below, but if the attackers manage to light the fort on fire three times, the game will end and your score will be saved.

Fire Attack is a score chaser, and whether you’re hitting those incoming torches or the heads of people, you’ll be earning two points per action. Once you get your soldier standing in the right spot you do need to press the button again to attack, but there’s no penalty for whiffing and there are only four places he can even stand. The system itself only has diagonally aligned buttons, the four buttons making it rather easy to be exactly where you want to be at the exact time. There is no ground you need to cover in the process of heading to the desired spot, travel all but instantaneous and thus allowing you to quickly smack all targets at once even if they’re all about to reach the point where they’ll set you aflame. While this does mean it’s possible to keep up with the action as the speed increases and more attackers start showing up, it also means it’s a bit too easy to keep them at bay, even an inattentive player really just needing to watch the spots nearest to the soldier for when they need to zip over and snuff out some fires.

Another unfortunate factor in Fire Attack’s design is that all four attacking angles are the same length. When someone appears down below or up above, you know the distance they need to clear will be the same, meaning it’s easier to get a hang of judging where to position the soldier first. You won’t know when a new attacker will appear, but as soon as they do, you don’t have to worry about their paths changing so you can figure out when they’ll need to be addressed even when the raid starts to become more heated. This isn’t like Fire on Game & Watch where the jumpers all look a bit alike so it can sometimes be hard to judge who is closest to the ground, there are two routes for torchbearers to take who take on a distinct pose when they’re available to attack and the torches that are being thrown actually lightly touch the fort when it’s time to smack them. This is one reason you don’t necessarily need to watch what the attackers are up to, it very clear when you’re in danger and so long as you’re reflexes are decent, you can get in your own attacks with relative ease.

Game A is the game’s easy mode, attackers only coming from three directions at once while Game B allows them to come from all four angles. Unfortunately, it feels like the approach to difficulty here was taking away a part of the intended design rather than the harder mode adding interesting complications, so Game B doesn’t have much to shake up the hammer swinging action. If you do rack up a Miss or two by letting the fort burn a little, they will be cleared away once you reach 200 points or 500. However, if you manage to perform perfectly before reaching those milestones, you’ll instead be granted a short period where your successful hammer swings earn you 5 points instead of 2. Score building would likely go by too quickly if the increased points were permanent so it makes sense it’s a limited time boost, but it also makes it less satisfying to reach such thresholds than in other Game & Watch games where double points leads to a new layer of tension until you fail.

THE VERDICT: Regardless of the game’s subject matter, the fort defense featured in Fire Attack is simply too basic to provide the kind of score challenge you’ll want to return to. Upping the speed and number of attackers does make things gradually harder, but the hammer swinging is still too manageable to add that sort of energy and tension you’d hope to find in a thrilling score chaser. With Game A just removing a route of attack there isn’t even interesting variation to be found, this Game & Watch too straightforward to earn your continued attention.

And so, I give Fire Attack for Game & Watch…

A BAD rating. While things do eventually get fast enough that you do need to be a bit watchful, Fire Attack really needed some sort of shifting element or trick to make it so you can’t succeed just by watching the central area. Sure, it’s good to look elsewhere to know something’s coming, but with clear indicators of when a torch or attacker actually need dealing with and those frames all being around the same area, it feels like the game can’t do much to try and force a failure. Fire Attack is fair, there is never a no-win situation, but you don’t need to keep track of anything beyond the four points where you can actually hit things. Again, Fire Attack could learn from Fire a bit, and not even in terms of how the characters are depicted. Fire introduces a lower jumper that means you need to watch an area that was otherwise not important, so if Game B instead maybe added some alternate attack route that was quicker, that could spice the play up a touch. An even smarter approach though could be spreading out the regions of the fort you need to protect. The torch tossers are likely meant to be on distant outcroppings, but they’re fairly close to the fort walls visually so if they were a nearly instant threat when they appear, heading over to knock away their torches would spread out the regions of the screen you need to watch. There needs to be a point where the player feels under pressure because the task requires a good deal of attention to continue on successfully, and Fire Attack doesn’t really feel like it reaches that point because all it adds to up the ante is speed.

Fire Attack’s design isn’t even that unique when it comes to Game & Watch titles, its theming certainly unique and questionable but there are many games where you need to be in one of four spots at the right time to survive. Actually making you swing the hammer makes it a bit more interactive than the handhelds where it really is just about positioning properly, but perhaps the designers put too much faith in that hammer swing being some engaging extra step when it really doesn’t slow down the fort defense much at all. Fire Attack is just too consistent and easily understood, earning a high score not exciting enough because it will likely will reach the point where you lose because you stopped paying attention rather than the game outfoxing you with its design.