Gunhed falls firmly into the straightforward category. Well what do you expect, it came out in 1989! In fact playing it again made me think about the shooters of nowadays and one glaring omission they all share - variety of weapons. Rarely do you find a shooter these days that offers you more than the one gun you start with. Sure you can power it up to ridiculous levels but you never get to change it like you did in almost every shooter released on a console until the mid-nineties. It's not a complaint, merely an observation, and it suits me to flit between old and new styles when the mood takes me, fickle as I am.

Anyway, I digress, back to the task in hand......

Gameplay.....

Gunhed is a no-nonsense vertical shooter with a nice variety of weapons and some very long levels (as you'd expect from Compile). There is only one ship to pilot and there seems to be some link to mecha, although i'm not quite sure what. I believe the game is based on anime of the same name, though I know nothing about this.

The game is 10 levels long with quite a nice difficulty curve and each level has a different theme (space station, brain level, desert) so far, so similar then, and let's face it, most shooters from around this time followed the same basic structure. Bosses are varied but seem small in comparison to your ship and are generally pretty easy to kill (unless you're unfortunate enough to have died just before getting to them in which case you're boned). On the plus side there are some quite nasty looking ones (especially the weird floating monster covered in eyes at the end of level 4).

The game has a particularly noteworthy weapons system offering you 4 types of weapon base - I. Bullets, II. Plasma Wave thingy, III.Laser, IV.Spinning Balls (which act as shields) and bullets. Each of these can be powered up 5 levels either by collecting 5 consecutive power up orbs of the same number or by collecting lots of the lovely shiny purple orbs that float around the screen after killing certain enemies. Each level gives you lots of each power up orbs meaning you can power up quickly and swap weapons with satisfying frequency. As well as the base weapons you can also collect one additional weapon; either Homing Missiles, Shield, Multi Shot (Gunhed's equivalent of Gradius' Option - although you can only have 2 at any one time) or Full Fire (this beefs up your primary weapon, the result depending on the weapon). Again, each of these can be powered up a number of times.

The only downside to this is that II and III are significantly better (read, more powerful) than I and IV so you'll end up only using 2 of the four unless you like more of a challenge. Compile obviously tried to introduce some strategy elements into the game by making each weapon seem to be more fitting to certain levels, however once you get II fully powered up with two Multishots or full homing Missiles, you're unlikely to want to change. You also start off with 3 smart bombs which increase in number alarmingly quickly the further through you play.

This imbalance in the weapons system, however, makes very little difference to the game from an enjoyment perspective, and there's plenty of that to be had here.

Controls are spot on; crank up your ship speed to 4 and you'll be hammering around each level blasting anything that moves, and this is really the essence of the game. There's nothing complicated to worry about, just get tooled up and immerse yourself in some pure and simple blasting. It really shouldn't be as much fun as it is, and it's very hard to pinpoint exactly what it is that makes this game so good, but I can't help but love playing it.

The Visuals.....

As with all games of this age, you have to look at the visuals relative to the machine's capabilities. Gunhed certainly didn't push the PC Engine too hard, but it does have a nice distinctive style as far as the visuals go. Sprites are satisfyingly chunky and generally things are nice and colourful and reassuringly solid. The only disappointments are some of the bosses which look too small and one or two rather bland backdrops. Certainly no ugly bugly though.

Music.........

The music to Gunhed is brilliant, if it was re-mixed today with some nice synths it would make a great album. Tunes are annoyingly memorable, even down to the title screen BGM.

Sound effects are also very nice with big explosions and metallic bullet hit sounds. Sometimes the music hardware can't quite handle all of the sound effects and music going on at once, but this is only occaisonal and really doesn't affect the overall experience.

A credit to the PC Engines meagre hardware then.

In Conclusion.....

Maybe it's because this is the first game I ever played on the PC Engine, or maybe it's because me and my mate played it till we nearly went blind when I was 14 just to get to the end of the game. Whatever it is, this game will always have a special place in my heart and never fails to raise a smile every time I hear the oh so familiar Title screen BGM.

It's a great game and huge amounts of fun. Simple and beautifully crafted - one to play in between sessions of the complicated shooters of today.

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