DR VANGTROS' AFTERBURNER CLIMAX REVIEW

AFTERBURNER CLIMAX
By Sega AM2, aka Angels in Heaven

"Firstly, it controls like the original. Which is great as next-gen games that take the original source material and 'make it better' often make it worse. I can't remember if you could speed up or down in the first one, but you can now, and there's a bullet-time style function called 'Climax'."

"When I Climax, everything doesn't slow down, so I don't know why this is. Maybe the Japanese do. Anyway. It plays a lot like the good Starfox games, Panzer Dragoon and the SEGA Star Wars Arcade game that was brilliant, but FASTER. A lot faster. And more chaotic with the amount of violence that comes your way. You basically spend the whole time moving and weaving around in circular paths and occasionally doing barrel rolls (which you can now do by pulling one direction, then another very quickly)."

"Some enemies will shoot one missile at you, some two and others FIVE. When these guys pop up, you have to roll away or you get completely shafted, but you feel it's your fault and not Sega's for being poo at design. Because they aren't... except with that Sega Casino game and Shadow the Hedgehog, which we'll pretend never happened."

"You lock onto enemies, then use bullets which are good for close range death or heat seeking missiles, which do the job better and seem to be infinite in number. If only love was infinite in number. Then we wouldn't have to 'liberate' all those girls coming home on the way back from sixth form college every other Wednesday."

"You can also rack up combos and the bullet-time Climax mode helps you do that. We managed to get around 40 once. The overall level progression structure is like Panzer Dragoon's, where you have multiple branches that weave in and out of the same narrative, and multiple endings. I kept getting the 'you are crap at life' one – Ending C. I'm sorry Afterburner; I'll try harder next time."

"Levels include the classic Oceanic landscape from the original, some canyons, cities at sundown and at night, cloud battles, areas filled with live volcanoes, a desert and an underground base chase where you fly through tunnels, avoid walls and lasers and need to fly slow so you don't die and disappoint the game, which ranks you as you play."

"We started off with a lot of high rankings, but as we were reminded of our inferiority through the crisp visual splendour of the game mocking our lack of talent of ever being able to replicate such godly work, we descended into sadness and forgot how to play the game."

"As for whether this could hit console, I asked the producer of the game who was on-hand to talk about it - which was impressively developed in under a year. Sadly, he said there are "no plans to bring this to console". Of course, that was probably the PR-safe answer he gives everyone, because we know it's coming out Xbox 360 and NOT PlayStation3, because Sega didn't really sign Virtua Fighter 5 to them. It was a spelling mistake."