Introduction:

This is my first in what I hope becomes a series of reviews, some retro, some more up-to-date. I chose this game because it is little known and stands out in my mind back in the Mega Drive/Genesis days. Why you may ask... Mostly because of the music, but more on that later.

One of the relatively few games in its genre, Air Diver is a in-cockpit shooter for the Mega Drive/Genesis. Released in 1990 by Asmik in Japan and picked up by Seismic for release in the US, Air Diver takes a page from Sega's Afterburner/G-loc series. While being in the same genre of Afterburner/G-loc, Air Diver lacks the graphic polish of either, granted... the former having the benefit of being released in arcades which has (had?) a higher production standard.

Highlights:

The story, less than inspiring, has you taking out some terrorists that are holding the world hostage. This sounds a bit cheesy but in reality doesn't really come into play during the course of the game with the exception of the intro and some small excerpts during the ending sequence.

You pilot an F-119 Stealth Fighter through 8 stages, roughly located within each continent, each featuring a different degree of difficulty. Your plane is equipped with Vulcan cannons and missiles, the latter being limited, the former unlimited. Your plane is also capable of boosting (for outrunning planes, barrel rolls and looping). Control is nice and tight with the option to reverse the up and down directions (like most flight based games). The layout of each stage goes as follows: destroy X amount of planes until scenery changes (phase one), destroy X amount of planes (phase 2), fight a boss (dogfight with a skilled plane/phase 3), then fight the end level boss ("carrier" battle/phase 4). This formula works well but it's worth mentioning that end level boss fights are quite different than the rest of the level. These battles have your plane lifted to a higher elevation, actually in space, fighting the carrier (what the game calls these bosses).You start the fight within a set "frame" in which you pan left to right dodging the bosses' attacks, which all seems simple, until the controls start drifting in whatever direction they want. What Asmik has done is add some level of zero gravity as far as I can tell, erratically moving your ship around without any discernable pattern. This forces you to struggle to move in the direction you want while trying to dodge attacks and get in a few well placed shots. This gives the boss fights an element of luck rather than straight-up skill and is somewhat aggravating to me since a large majority of my deaths stem from this aspect that you have no control over.

Now on to my favorite aspect of Air Diver, the music. Very fitting within the game and holds it's own outside of that context. Somewhat unique and hard to liken to other games I can remember, the music varies from persistent droning to pulse pounding battle pieces. I enjoyed some of the tracks so much that I even transcribed a few for play on real instruments... Unfortunately there was no official soundtrack release of this game and fans of the music are forced to rip it themselves, though not too difficult since there is a sound test within the option screen.

Verdict:

Nothing particularly innovative overall but a decent offering all around, worth giving a try for the music if nothing else.