Space Harrier is a bit of a fossil from the old Sega arcade games. The game is clearly designed to waste quarter after quarter with its fast pace gameplay added with the additionally hard to see and harder to avoid obstacles that zoom toward you constantly. So that explains why it was so easy for my friend and I to simply pick up this game and beat it within an hours time because we had unlimited continues. Really it just got to the point where we didn’t really care about our life’s, only trying to progress far enough to get to the end. Ya, we could improve our score more by dying less, but honestly in this day and age Space Harrier would probably be looked like more as a mini game of sorts. It’s not really that it’s bad as a game, but simply very out dated now.
But for being such an old relic it is still surprisingly fun avoiding obstacles and going through the game at crazy speeds. Shooting enemies is fun and all, but really when it comes down to it the biggest obstacle in this game is, well, the obstacles. I never really felt threatened by the enemies in this game, and even less from any of the bosses. They all rely on simple patterns that are easy to avoid, while also having pretty much the same weakness overall. The game just isn’t set to be really challenging save for the environment. The music and graphics are nostalgic though, and admittedly has a very catchy tune that can get stuck in your head, but nothing impressive. If anything the game hurts your eyes more than it pleases, with enemies and obstacles constantly zooming past you with out so much as “a how do you do?”.
Final Thoughts:
Space Harrier may feel for a lot of nostalgia for some arcade rats, but as a game nowadays it doesn’t hold up much compared to other shooters out there. It has some nice tunes to it, and the enemies are really weird and creative, but when it gets down to it there isn’t much of a challenge to this game when continues are given out like candy. Really Space Harrier is just a bizarre and quirky relic from the past.