Unsatisfying sequel to the arcade classic shoot ’em up featuring brilliant soundtrack.

Story

The enemy is reported to be building military bases and airfields in the desert. The mission objectives for the F-14 Tomcat fighter are quite clear; search and destroy all hostile forces. Heavy resistance is expected.

The Game

After Burner III on the Mega-CD is, as the name implies a sequel to the original After Burner II released in 1987, and delivers more arcade air combat action. In the After Burner games you play as the Navy’s fiercest F-14 Tomcat fighter on a no-brains mission to fight against an unspecified enemy army.
After Burner III can be played from either a first person cockpit view or a third-person chase-cam view. You have unlimited amounts of heat-seeking Aim-9 Sidewinder missiles and ammunition for the 20mm Vulcan Cannon. Furthermore you also have unlimited fuel so you can increase your flying speed by using the F-14’s afterburners.

Content

After Burner III has two different game modes; the standard Arcade mode, and the Competition mode.
The Arcade mode can be played in three different difficulty settings, but the difference between them are only subtle – either way you play it, this game is punishingly hard.
The basic goal of the game is to reach the end of all the 21 stages and shoot down as many enemy aircraft as possible. The game begins on the airport and soon after you’ve taken to the skies as enemies begin to appear as small dots on the sky. When they come close enough to launch their attacks you must do what it takes to avoid being hit – bank, roll and dive through enemy fire. If you’re fast, you can lock the enemies in your reticle and blast them out of the sky before they have the chance to fire missiles at you. Enemy attack waves can appear both in the air or on the ground, and since you are heavily outnumbered, you have to be fast and precise.

On the harder difficulty settings, more missiles are going to be shot at you. The enemies will act faster. The second you see incoming missiles you must be quick to react to the threat because one hit is enough to blow you into bits. To make things worse, the enemy missiles are heat-seeking too. As each stage has somewhere around 30-80 enemies, you’re basically going to be dodging missiles non-stop – and yes, there are occasions that are close to impossible, if not impossible to get out of alive.

Every now and then in your mission you reach a military base. There you must fly low and destroy as much of it as possible.
The game is very fast paced and captures the stressful action of arcade air combat nicely. You will fight over deserts, seas and land in both day and night conditions. The environment of the stage does not have any effect on the gameplay however, but is rather a visual effect that adds to the atmosphere.

The Competition mode lets you compete for the best scores based on two different criteria; time survived or number of enemies shot down. There are two separate high score tables for the two game variants. Here you’re only given two lives to rake in your top score, as opposed to the Arcade mode where you are given four continues after you’ve lost your first two lives.

Controls

The controls are briefly explained before the game begins which is nice. Once in the game you are free to ascend, descend, do rolls, twists, and turns as you see fit. The controls feel somewhat jerky and stale because it seems that everything in the sky follows your exact moves, rendering the feeling of freedom a little flat.

As mentioned above, the game can be played in two different views, selected from the options screen. The game seems somewhat easier when played from the chase-cam view as you have a better view of the immediate surroundings of your aircraft, and that helps when dodging missiles.
In order to lock enemy targets with the tracking scanner system you simply need to aim the scanner at the target. When a target is locked, a voice will confirm it by calling out ‘Fire!’ and pressing the B button will then launch a missile at that target. You can lock multiple targets at one time but you need to fire one missile for each target if you want to take them all down. In the heat of the action you must try to fire one missile for every locked-on target.

The Vulcan Cannons are practically useless except for the rare occasions in which you are behind an enemy aircraft. Otherwise it’s impossible to hit anything with it.
There is a compass in the cockpit HUD that indicates which direction you are flying in, and you are free to fly in any direction you want. Once you have passed all the enemy waves of the stage you are automatically taken to the next one.

For each stage you beat, the game seems to become harder – the enemies will come in bigger formations and some will even sneak up behind you. When that happens you need to get make some quick turns in order to get away from them before they blast you out of the sky.
When you reach the military bases, you’re supposed to engage in some air-to-ground action. Locking on missiles on ground targets is simple enough, but avoiding shots from tanks and anti-air guns is clearly a problem that the developers should have looked more into – it’s basically impossible to see what’s going on there because the animation is so jerky and to make things worse, everything happens way too fast. You have little to no time to react to enemy fire, which feels a little too unforgiving.

Graphics

The game runs fast but everything is incredibly choppy. The sprite scaling seems to happen way too fast and the sprites tend to overlap in a way that makes it completely impossible to see what’s what. The whole game has a rather cold feel and lifeless feel. The 21 levels are mostly just color variations of the sky and ground and the details on the ground are pretty scarce.
The animation is pretty jerky overall and since much of the game is based on sprite scaling, you’d wish that the scaling would be much smoother. Sure enough the game is fast paced but it’s hard to follow the on-screen action sometimes because of the amount of sprites and the choppy animation.
The game looks a bit more alive when played from the chase-cam view because it simply gives you a better view of the action.

Sound

The music is the best part of the entire game and the big redeeming factor here – it’s freaking awesome! The soundtrack has arranged versions of all the classic songs from After Burner and After Burner II playing off of the CD, and it’s really great music. As perfect as those original songs were in their previous games, they’re even better when played with real drums, synthesizers, trumpets and electric guitars as heard here. The music is catchy, upbeat, rocky and filled with an underdog’s fighting spirit – all at the same time. Needless to say it accommodates the game perfectly and couldn’t be better.

Summary

After Burner III is quite repetitive, stressful and unfair in its nature because of its steep difficulty and choppy visuals. We don’t think that it lives up to the name – the earlier games in the series played much better and had arguably better graphics.
This game is a bit too hard to warrant casual playing and hardcore players will probably want a game with better controls and more satisfying gameplay in the long run. Looking beyond its flaws, After Burner III is still an action packed game where every second is a life-and-death decision, all accompanied by a soundtrack that is sure to raise goosebumps in any shoot ’em up fanatic. However, this isn’t a game that you’d want to play for any long periods simply because there are so many better games out there.

Developed By: CRI Middleware
Published By: Sega
Version Reviewed: Mega-CD
Genre: Shoot ’em Up
Players: 1
Released: 1992