Warhawk

Looking for an authentic retro shoot-em-up?! Good news! FULL PLAYTHROUGH: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SppqTKC2AK8

[h1]Actually decent shmup. Not an arcade quarter muncher.[/h1] This may have been my first time playing a [b]Warhawk[/b] game (I played so many DOS games it's a bit of a blur..). I had always assumed the original 1987 [b]Warhawk[/b] to be a cult classic, but with just 2 reviews on this 2017 release after 8 years made me seriously doubt its cult status and think of it more as a forgotten piece of history. I even somehow had a couple of renditions of the theme of [b]Warhawk[/b] already in my music playlist (not the particular version this game uses). The music is okay. Much of it is variations of the same theme (it's a good, classic theme though!). The levels are VERY short, but there are 20 of them. You can start at whichever level you last died at, so you can beat the game in an hour or so on your first playthrough. [b]This game makes you spam the fire button, you can't just press and hold it[/b] which is a very antiquated control scheme for a shmup. Normally I leave it there after beating a shmup, but then I noticed there were 2 Steam achievements for [b]Warhawk[/b] that nobody has obtained. It didn't seem too absurd of a challenge to attempt to acquire these, but i…

So the game is a quasi remake of its 1986 predecessor. While the game is, to quote Futurama "old, old, incredibly old school", it wasn't as obnoxiously hard as I expected it to be, a plus for me. Still a decent challenge, but one you will find much easier once you've made yourself acquainted with the stages and bosses. There are 20 (rather short) stages, every even numbered level has a boss, odd ones have a mini boss. The difficulty goes up accordingly. While at times really hard, it never felt unfair. Unlike most shoot'em ups I've played, here you have actual health and you can take quite a number of hits, that's not making it easy though. There is only one power up which you lose when taken too many hits. With it, your main shot that requires mashing the fire button, is upgraded to a slightly more powerful auto shot (the same as when you hold and release your charged main shot). The whole game is really neat in terms of design. It's simple and easy to grasp. Enemies have a lot of visual veriety even if some are mechanically identical (or very similar). The stages, while short, are still nice to look at and get more menacing the closer you get to the end. The music is very fitt…