When you’re talking about flight games, they generally fall into one of three categories: hardcore flight simulators with ultra-realistic physics, arcade dog fighting games with streamlined physics and controls and horizontal or vertical shooters.
Most flight games fall somewhere in between the first and second categories, often tweaking the flying style so you can bank, barrel roll and other useful tricks to avoid missile collisions or get enemy bogies in your sights.
After Burner: Climax is a hands-down 100 percent arcade game (it’s actually a port of an arcade title of the same name Sega debuted in 2006), but it doesn’t operate exactly under normal parameters—namely, it’s much faster. Much, much faster.
The game’s sense of speed is, in a word, ridiculous. If you think about fast, forward motion in a game—whether it’s racing, aerial dogfighting or whatever else—it’s fast, sure, but always programmed so that a seasoned player can skillfully navigate the track or level without getting tripped up too much.
The speed in Climax, on the other hand, is even faster. You can still blaze through a level in one piece (after a few tries, anyway) but the game’s clip is disorienting at first. The camera moves relentlessly onward, even if you’ve eaten the front-end of an enemy’s missile one too many times, and if you don’t shoot down whoever’s in your crosshairs within the pretty stringent three- to five-second window you get to do so, there’s no second chance.
In fact, playing through the game with some of the extra options turned on (like the ability to fly at max speed at all times), you can blow through a level in around 30 seconds, literally.
Thank god the game’s blink-and-you-miss-it gameplay is streamlined to the degree it is. Your missiles constantly reload and you don’t run out of machine gun ammo, and any time your reticle touches an enemy plane, it goes down in flames in seconds. You can also build up your combo meter to unleash a Panzer Dragoon-like volley of missiles.
Not that you have time to sit around and watch the fireworks. Climax throws you into a constant kaleidoscopic barrage of smoke trails and explosions that leaves you very little time to even understand what’s going on before it’s zipped right by you.
The game is still gorgeous though, running at a high frame rate (if it’s not a constant 60 frames per second, I’d be damn surprised) and sporting great HD visuals. Running on the original arcade hardware in 2006, the game looked good, but this new version blows it away.
Sadly, there’s a downside to all the breakneck action herein: The game is really short. Again, this is an arcade port, and you can see exactly how, since you can get shot down in as little as 10 or 15 seconds—you can almost imagine how much money it would take to get to the end of the game.
However, with the convenience of console ports, that’s not really a problem, so you can beat the game in about 10 minutes. The first play-through took me about 12, with continue times added in, and the second took a whole seven.
Caveat emptor: This game is awesome, but if you’re not looking for an arcade dogfighter, $10 can be a little steep. This is one of those games you play over and over to unlock extras and improve your score, rather than getting a long experience the first time around. Still, it’s hard to argue with how badass it is to waste an entire screen full of enemy bogeys with a well-placed combo.