After Burner: Black Falcon

It’s very tough to update old-school arcade games gracefully. Change too much, and people accuse you of ignoring the franchise’s heritage. Change too little, and people will say the series is stuck in a rut. This second situation is unfortunately how we feel about After Burner: Black Falcon, an update to publisher Sega’s beloved arcade flight shooter series After Burner. It’s not as bad a collision with the past as would be, say, taking Mick Jagger shopping for Speedos, but it isn’t exactly plugging your iPod straight into your hybrid-fuel car’s stereo, either.

There are three pilots and some 15 jets in Black Falcon, but they all do more or less the same thing: fly really fast straight ahead, blasting land, sea, and air-based enemies with guided missiles, rockets, and machine gun. Each mission has one big goal – usually shooting down one or more rogue pilots who stole a batch of experimental planes (that’s the storyline) – and a few secondary objectives. These vary from pilot to pilot, but usually involve blowing up a certain number of a specific type of enemy, completing a level within a certain time limit, and so on. These mission-critical targets can be hard to find though, so just plan on blowing anything that moves to pieces. 

Trouble is, this isn’t exactly piloting a jet as you know it from other games – this is an on-rails shooter, so it’s more like piloting a jet down an invisible tube. You can’t turn around, and you can forget that Immelman maneuver (you do have an evasive barrel roll, though). Now, granted, this is exactly like the original After Burner, so we can’t gripe too much about that. But what we can gripe about is the fact that the swooshy camera and controls conspire to make it way too hard to see exactly where you’re pointing, and thus far too easy to slam into rocks formations, icy cliffs, and other obstacles.