It may not be as cool as it sounds, but it's still a fun game and that's what really matters.
Enter Hellfire.
Now try not to get me wrong, I'm a man who likes a fair challenge and I try not to be one of those ***king post Generation Y teenagers who whine about a shooter with a default tough difficulty, but seriously, really analyze what I just said: I am a MAN and I like a FAIR challenge. By 'fair' I mean a game that has a balanced difficulty where it's a toss between a little bit of memory with a dash of skill and little bit of luck that'll kick my butt but will continually entice me to progress every time rather than kick me in the face. By 'man' I mean that I have a lot of real-life stress and problems I have to deal with and when I'm playing older games in desperate search of stress relief through fun and trying to avoid the monotony of pointless unlockables the last thing I want is to play a game that retaliates to my frustration by kicking me in the balls. Seeing how Hellfire is a Toaplan shooter, it makes me want to strap on my stainless-steel jock strap, but thankfully it has some compensating factors.
The story to Hellfire is standard to say in the least. It's the future, mankind lives in peace and has colonized different places, but a galactic army comes outta nowhere and starts enslaving everyone, so it's up to one faceless dude named Captain Lancer (God I betcha anything he's white...) to try and liberate each colony using a made-on-the-spot ship called the CNCS-1 that uses a space-age beam of fire called the Hellfire as its bomb weapon as well as multidirectional laser-fire to get the job done.
I have to say the ship itself looks a little too phallic for its own good, in this case looking like a twist of the steamy-pink triple-grip knob will allow it to vibrate and do other things I couldn't type here without getting kicked off the Gamespot forums, but all of this magically changes when you acquire a pick-up that turns your stupid knobby wing-things into long, pointy, evil looking claw-like wing-things.
The biggest selling-point of Hellfire is that your shots can be fired in four different directions. Every time you hit the button to change the direction of your shots, the color of your wings changes indicating which direction the shots will fire in: Pink fires straight, yellow fires from the tail of the ship, green fires vertically both ways (up & down) and blue fires in all four diagonal directions.
All of this definitely adds to the game's strategy as you will encounter many enemy waves and enemies that require being shot in different directions.
Now, I'll say straight up that the strategic blasting in Hellfire is pretty fun and it's definitely challenging, but it comes attached with some rather painful flaws, namely the shifting between color and shots on the fly. Seeing how you have to cycle through the directions you need to fire in, it's frustrating having to change directions every time a new enemy comes up especially when you haven't finished fighting a stronger enemy that use the new-coming enemies as a distraction to cream you and send you to the previous check-point. And this happens a lot in Hellfire. And none of this is excused by the ship's evident lack of firepower; no matter what, your shots will always feel just a little too weak for their own good. At full power, your shots are optimum for kamikazes an average-sized enemies, but for anything and everything that requires more than twenty hits will feel like trying to take down a sky-scraper with a rock.
The only compensation for your lack of overall firepower strength is the title weapon, the Hellfire, a straight-firing flame weapon that is so incredible that the only thing it kills is the sound, seeing how there's a delay in the sound effects every time you fire it more than once and seeing how it drowns out every other sound once fired.
I wasn't expecting the Hellfire to be a doomsday device that kills everything with one hit, but the Hellfire just lacks the performance necessary to be effective in combat. It's like they put you in a combat zone with a sawed-off shotgun and everyone else has high-powered flamethrowers: there's a good chance you'll take a few guys with you, but for the most part you can consider yourself barbecue.
Thankfully you do get a shield in the game that grips your ship, blighting most shmup shields that encase your ship with a plasma barrier is enormous you couldn't keep it even if you held still. You also get a little option thingy called the Seeker that will occasionally act as shot collecting invincible kamikaze weapon, but unfortunately you can only get one of them and the not only gets lower considering how erratic and schizophrenic the little booger is. Seriously, every time you're in desperate need of a shot-collecting kamikaze life-saver, the damn thing is off twirling around in a random corner of the enemy base inspecting the building's foundation.
Hellfire is one of those games that was a little too ahead of its time, not so much in graphics and sound, as much as in its controls. Shifting between firing positions gets very tedious during intense combat and only having one button to shift through the different positions is a bit unforgiving. Hellfire would've been better on a four-button controller release like the Dreamcast, something that would've allowed faster access to the weapons so as to make up for enemies that force you to think and react faster than the flight speed of a mosquito.
Of course, this is a Toaplan game so rest-assured there's going to be a checkpoint system and rest assured that this particular checkpoint system will REGRESS every time you die immediately after starting from the first checkpoint... Sometimes, I really don't pity Toaplan for declaring bankruptcy. I know they liked to give you a lot of credits depending on what difficulty you play the game on, but that still doesn't remove the fact that checkpoints just mess with the flow of the game. I wouldn't complain about checkpoints in platformers mind you because the pace of the game isn't supposed to be fast in those games, but that can't be said with shooters; patience is not one of their virtues.
The audio of Hellfire really stands out among others. The sound is flawed only in the fact that there's a delay in sound like when you change firing positions too fast and some sounds beat each other out, but for the most part the sound quality itself is pretty good as explosions don't sound like pseudo crunching noises and your shots don't sound like farts.
The music actually gets a lot of points because it actually matches the action. Y'see, Toaplan really likes to make long games and I mean long as in levels that feel like they last five minutes straight (ten if you don't screw it up). All of this can get really boring or at least wouldn't feel right if the music was really fast and furious. Hellfire's soundtrack however plays out at a very appropriate speed in that none of the songs are too fast and none of them are too slow (well okay, two of them are) and almost every one of them are really catchy. I should say right now that there is a faster pitched version of the soundtrack looming around on the Mega Drive version which I think is safe to say is the only regional difference between the two.
The graphics are only borderline fantastic as they come close to showcasing some of the Genesis' technical abilities, but not exactly close enough. The first and last levels stand out as the best in the game's visuals, but sandwiched between them are the usual lightly dull and fairly detailed backgrounds, foregrounds and enemies of most Genesis games. If anything, the game uses the Genesis' color palette fairly enough so that it won't stab you in the eyes with unworldly color nor will it make you want to fall asleep.
I sort of have a love/hate relationship with this game due to its frustrating weapon color-changing and regressive chekpoint system, but there's a part of me that really keeps me coming back for more abuse despite the game clearly telling me to **** off every time. There's something genuinely engaging about the game between its weak story and obnoxious enemies which I can't tangibly put my finger on. I'm willing to guess it's the power of charm the game has that kept me hugging and fondling every direct R-Type clone and Resident Evil clone known to man, mainly because each clone was able to replicate and simultaneously tinker with the same kind of atmosphere and feeling its originator established, just enough to make it stand out from its original source. Despite this, Hellfire isn't in any way, shape or form an R-Type clone, but it's got a similar feel to it: the game's pretty difficult, but there's just something really FUN about the whole thing. It's the kind of game where the term 'roll with it' applies and it's hard not to roll with a game that makes you use your head.
Overall, Hellfire is similar to Sinistron for the Turbo Grafix 16: visually and audibly speaking, the game is nothing short of great with enough charm to keep the replay value up with enough style to make it stand out from many, but the controls and gameplay are all weighed down by a spike-encrusted checkpoint system and a uniquely designed space fighter with one too many design flaws that couldn't survive a minute without showering itself in power-ups. And for those of you who haven't played Sinistron, I recommend Hellfire on the same conclusion: if you're the kind of person who can withstand Hellfire's design challenges, then you're in for an otherwise good and, more importantly, entertaining game (and one with a better ending).