Much like other Konami games that shamelessly exploited real-world sentiments at the time, the NES game that is Jackal starts off with a very simple menu screen with a gaudy logo, which, if left unattended, gives way to a very brief and hardly informative 8-bit cutscene that shows the premise of the game.
And the premise of the game is simple: the player controls a band of gung-ho pseudo-American soldiers (who were commonly represented in action-packed NES games of the time with their nationalities tending to be not officially obvious but all-too-apparent). By the statement of "gung-ho pseudo-American soldiers", that means the player has to blow up a whole bunch of things – hostile or otherwise.
This story/game design was quite prevalent at the time.
At face level, the differences that Jackal has compared to other such games is that the player takes control of a versatile, powerful jeep and drives it all over levels, with the player looking from a top-down perspective.
Of course, there were other games that used the same perspective and the jeep has a gameplay function that is no different from the player character sprites in these other games, but Konami had utilized the thematic design of the jeep sprite in meaningful, clever ways that set Jackal a bit apart from the rest; these will be described later.
Starting the first level shows the player that Konami was not really taking the theme of military conflict in this game seriously; the statement "This Battle Will Make Your Blood Boil!" which is displayed outright from the start would convince any player of this.
The controls can send the jeep in anyone of the eight cardinal directions, and they can also change the jeep's course instantly without the need for clumsy three-point-turns, U-turns or any other automobile maneuvers.
With such a deftly agile vehicle, the player is expected to dodge and weave in between enemy fire because just a single shot from any enemy is enough to obliterate the jeep. (There is a good, visual reason for this as will be described later.)
Indeed, there can be so much enemy fire that a player may mistake this game for one of the "bullet hell" or shoot-'em-up games. However, a few major traits of this game remind the player that it isn't.
For one, coming into contact with enemies do not necessarily cause the jeep to blow up immediately. It can collide with certain enemies, such as turrets with wide foundations, without much of a problem. The player can also have the jeep running over enemies on foot, instantly killing them – something that shoot-'em-ups, and many other NES games in fact, do not let the player character do. (These games usually have the player character incurring damage or dying outright upon mere contact with even the puniest of enemies.)
Running over enemy infantry is fun, but shooting is the most efficient method to rid the screen of enemies. The jeep can fire in the direction that it is facing (which thus makes running over enemy infantry quite risky and inefficient), and it is initially armed with a relatively weak pea-shooter and a decent grenade launcher.
To up-gun the jeep, the player will have to indulge in a completely optional segment of the game, which also happens to show how different this game is from others of its time.
Every map in the game has prisons set up by the enemy faction (whose identity remains unknown throughout the game). Unlike other games where the player character's progress throughout a level is often irreversible, the jeep can wander around the entire map as much as the player likes – and the player would usually do this in order to find these prisons (or to eliminate every hostile in the map).
This (somewhat-)free-wandering game design is certainly a welcome change from the usual 'walling-off' of any location that the player character has passed through in other games, and also shows how well Konami had utilized the memory resources of the NES.
Anyway, the player has to have the jeep violently busting open these prisons - for there can be no other way for gung-ho protagonists to "rescue" prisoners of war – and then wait for the (surviving) fellows to exit the ruined buildings.
The player can then approach them with the jeep and scoop any number of them up – the jeep for all purposes has the "magic bag" game design rule.
A few of these prisoners appear to be colored differently from the rest; he flashes in a manner not unlike that of Power Stars from the older Mario games. Picking this person up will upgrade the aforementioned grenade launcher of the jeep into a rocket launcher, which is more powerful and has bigger area-effect damage.
There are several variants of the rocket launcher. The first level of upgrade provides only a short-ranged rocket variant, while the next gives a longer-ranged one. Further upgrades cause the missile to splinter into smaller explosives that can travel up to four directions (which will always be north, south, east and west – and which is a bit disappointing). There is a limit of upgrades, but the maximized rocket launcher is plenty devastating enough, considering that there is no limit to ammunition.
(It is also worth noting here that while the missile/grenade cannot pass through obstacles, the splinters can. This can be exploited to remove enemies which are behind said obstacles.)
Returning to the matter of rescuing P.O.W.'s, if the player has the jeep eliminated, any P.O.W. that the jeep has is also eliminated. This could be an overlooked game design or a deliberate one, but in either case, it encourages the player not to make the proverbial mistake of having all eggs in one basket.
To rack up higher scores, the player has to go to the helipad in the current level (there is usually only one in any level) and offload the P.O.W.'s to a friendly helicopter that happens to be able to land on the helipad without getting targeted in any way by the enemy. (Enemy fire also happens to pass through the sprites for P.O.W.'s too.)
Every P.O.W. gives bonus points, while "Power Star" P.O.W.'s give even more. To provide an in-game incentive to racking up scores, there are score thresholds in the game that will grant extra lives when reached.
It would appear that the act of rescuing P.O.W.'s can be quite bothersome if compared to the part of the game that is about blowing stuff up, so to ease this task, the game allows the player to have the jeep move away from prisons or the helipad to engage any hostile that happens to be threateningly close. This game design makes the player much less vulnerable to unwelcome disruptions and is certainly expedient.
The segment of the game that is about blowing stuff up is more than a bit reminiscent of typical shoot-'em-ups.
While the enemy faction remains canonically unidentifiable (and the fact of which shows Konami's lackadaisical attitude to the story), it is apparent that it is, however, very heavily armed and very well-entrenched.
All enemies in the game appear to be visually armed with weapons that could practically annihilate the jeep (which is a light vehicle after all) in one shot. This includes footsoldiers who seem to be – oddly enough – widely armed with what appear to be tube-like anti-armor weapons.
Getting one-shot by enemies will cause the jeep to respawn, provided that the player has lives left. The game will re-insert the sprite for the jeep, which will be temporarily rendered with a visual effect similar to that for Mario Power Stars to indicate that the jeep has been rendered invulnerable for a brief while. This certainly helps the player extricate the jeep from proverbial hot water. This is of course not an original game design, but it is pleasant to have Konami remembering lessons learnt from other games.
Other enemies in the game include tanks and turrets which can only fire in the eight cardinal directions. Unlike infantry, these can take quite a lot of damage (though maxed-out rocket launchers annihilate them in a single blast). The jeep however cannot run into tanks without being knocked out. (This is a fact that should be apparent to players who know better, but for those who do not, there is unfortunately no in-game indicator that this would occur.)
In later levels, there are more enemy types thrown into the mix, such as jeeps that are just as fast as the player's, and troop carriers that can continuously spawn enemy infantry. As the player penetrates deeper into enemy territory towards the enemy HQ, there will be more troublesome enemies and obstacles to contend with, such as aircraft, enemy naval assets, land mines and defense laser fields.
However, even as they get more powerful and visually intimidating, the enemies in this game have plenty of design flaws, as was to be expected from most NES games. While this drawback is understandably pervasive during the 8-bit era, it certainly reminds the player that there are few things that differentiate Jackal from the rest.
For example, most mobile ground-based enemies usually stop to fire their weapons – a behavior that is easily exploitable. Another example would be that enemy aircraft unerringly always appears from the same edge of the screen and the same spot on that edge every time that a level is replayed.
The bosses in this game also do not fare much better in terms of design, though they are thematically and visually very impressive. The first boss battle has the player taking on a company of huge tanks that have sprung an ambush on the jeep, while the next one concerns a battery of missile silos hidden in giant stone busts. An experienced player will be able to spot their weaknesses (which often involve 'safe spots' in the segment of the map for the boss battle concerned) and exploit these, but not before having admired their sprites.
Unfortunately, the payoff for terminating these bosses is a bit underwhelming. Most of them just go silent once their vital components have been destroyed, or in the case of bosses which consist of a single sprite, they just explode in a brief animation. Levels are also capped with the same picture of the Jackal crew yelling "Yeah!!!!" while gunning their jeeps, firing willy-nilly (which again is indicative of Konami's neglect of the story element).
As for the levels, they have been created with each level having a visual theme. The first level is a beach-head, filled with wooden buildings of apparently temporary nature and some palm trees. Otherwise, the map is quite open and easy to move around in.
As the game progresses, the jeep journeys deeper into increasingly established enemy territory, and this visually shows: there will be more concrete edifices and static defenses, until eventually the final few levels will look very heavily fortified with redoubts, sandbag emplacements and lots of walls to hinder movement.
There are even special obstacles with their own scripts, like escalators (which are running in the opposite direction) that are intended to hinder the jeep's advance.
The maps also have plenty of non-gameplay-related decorations, such as signs, high-detail concrete buttresses and runways complete with painted symbols and arrows, among other things that showed that the map designers have spent extra time putting finishing touches on maps.
Jackal's maps may visually seem like yet another product of simple 8-bit graphics, but they certainly do serve to bolster the sense of progression in this game. In fact, they may be the strongest, most interesting aspect of the game.
If there is a flaw with the maps, it is that they scroll a bit too slowly; the jeep can be too close to the edge of the screen for comfort, and an enemy sprite can suddenly appear in front of the jeep. Fortunately, enemies off-screen will be rendered disabled until the player has the screen move over them again. (This can also be exploited to divide and conquer large swathes of enemies.)
This game design is especially handy in keeping the chaos of the co-op two-players game mode manageable.
The sprites for hostile enemies are surprisingly varied. There are a couple different types of footsoldiers (with one firing more projectiles than the other), several variants of tanks (which vary in size and strength) and several different turrets, among other sprites. Most enemies, however, generally have the purpose of homing in on the jeep while filling the screen with shots.
Still, the player won't be seeing much repetition of sprites.
However, the player character itself, which is the jeep, does not have a sprite and animations that are as impressive. One can play this game and observe that the crewmen of the jeep are not much visible. Canonically, the Jackal squad crew manned this jeep (and the other jeep if another player decides to join the first one for a co-op game) and they all have names, but the game and story designs rendered their presence (or lack of it) pretty much inconsequential, i.e. they are not any important to the game at all.
A perhaps bigger disappointment is that the projectiles fired from the jeep are merely generated from the front edge of the jeep's sprite, e.g. the mounted gun on the jeep is really only there for cosmetic reasons. Of course, the projectiles fired by enemies are also generated in the same way, but some of them actually have secondary animations when they fire.
With little more than some minor animations to show the rumbling of the jeep as it moves, the player is reminded that the jeep's sprite has no other functions than a mobile generator of weapons-fire particles and a receptacle for P.O.W. sprites.
Jackal has a very minimalist HUD. There is a score counter for either player, as well as a couple of mundane characters that depict the number of additional lives for either player. While it is bare-boned, it does keep screen-clutter to a minimum and helps the player focused on the mayhem.
If there is one particularly great trait that Konami games have during the time of the NES, it's that many of them have great 8-bit music; Jackal is no different.
Most levels have upbeat soundtracks that punctuate the struggle of a single plucky jeep against a heavily equipped enemy military, with even more upbeat music playing for boss battles. Of course, if one is already well-versed in action-packed NES games of the time (especially those involving "gung-ho pseudo-Americans"), the soundtracks would sound all-too-familiar.
For Jackal's sound effects, there are the usual tinny 8-bit noises typically found in NES games of such themes: electronic beeps, boops and rasps of various tones play when the player is picking up P.O.W.'s, firing weapons and is causing something to explode, et cetera. The sound effects in this game are commonplace fare – nothing that makes Jackal aurally unique from other Konami run-and-gun games.
Yet, most players would probably be more engrossed in removing enemy sprites from the screen than listening to the audio designs.
In conclusion, while Jackal's graphics, core gameplay and audio may not set it apart from the rest of Konami's games, its other aspects like the map designs and the tremendous number of sprites in this game help in ensuring the experience of playing Jackal is a great and perhaps even unique one for most players.