Genesis ~ Red Zone Review

Overview

This game involves a controlling a green helicopter and steroid pumped troops into a bunch of missions, all in overhead view. After going through those waste of time intro scenes, it is obvious this game takes advantage of the Sega Genesis's full graphical and audio capabilities.

Gameplay

You are in control of a fully armed green helicopter and you are to direct it to places to do all sorts of things. Mostly dropping of your troops and blowing things up. This is quite standard for a shoot em up game. However there are some sick things that set this game below standard to make it a good game to play. Your helicopter is so pathetically weak. It even gets damaged when you run into these tall posts made out of metal. When the helicopter blows up, it's already game over. Does a big war really depend on a single helicopter?

Then we have the bits of the game where your troops are deployed, where you pick one of the 3 characters to take the mission, all of whom which look overly muscled, especially that disgusting looking women. Although this does add an extra dimension to the game, it is only very average. You run around, kill a few men and do whatever.

5 out of 10

Graphics

The first thing you see once the game starts are these unavoidable intro screens. You have to wait about 40 seconds to get through it all until the menu comes up. Not good for the impatient. And one of those intro screens shows all the fancy graphical features in the game. I might as well quote it:

"Rotating Background Graphics

Rotating Background Texture

3D Vector Sprite Graphics

3D Vector Polygon Graphics

Realtime Zoom

Full Motion Video Compression

All running without the extra use of additional hardware"

So what!? This game is such a big show off, because other games use graphic features that have these sort of technical terms as well. Quite frankly during the game, there is nothing to marvel at in amazement. I could admit some of the screen movement (ie the helicopter flying around with the background changing etc) look very good indeed for a Sega Genesis, but the quality of the graphics themselves are average.

3.25 out of 5

Sound and Music

Some of the music tunes are quite cool to listen to, while some of them are just pure crap. Like this one called "Walking", because it seriously gave me a headache. As for the sound effects, they're just average. I have to mention that the gun firing sound effects are very bad.

3 out of 5

Game Design

For the helicopter bits, there is nothing special about them. I can't understand why there are these tall posts that look like they're made out of metal. Even with big gaps in between them, you can't fly through them and if you try to, your helicopter will get seriously damaged.

For the bits where you use your troops, again there is nothing special about them. There is this bit on level 3 where you have to run through this very long tunnel that takes roughly over a minute to get through. This of course really ticked me off and also shows some poor level designing. There are some other disturbing bits, but I can't be bothered going through any more of them.

2 out of 5

Longevity

You often die too quickly to have any fun at all, therefore putting you off to go further. But because the game is so challenging, it makes the entire game last longer. A good thing is how there is a password option to continue where you left off in case you felt like it. I certainly didn't.

2 out of 5

For: good smooth animation, some cool music, challenging, password option.

Against: average gameplay, some crap music, some crap sound effects, average looking graphics, some poor level design, game doesn't last for long in one sitting.

To conclude, Red Zone is a mediocre action game that manages to arrogantly show off its graphical features common to lots of other Sega Genesis games.