Sega Ages G-LOC Air Battle

Genre: On-Rails Shooter

Players: 1, Online Leaderboards

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Review:

Sega Ages G-LOC is a classic faux-3D On-Rails Shooter originally released to arcades in 1990, and is generally seen as a spin-off of Sega’s popular Afterburner series. For a more modern comparison, think of this as a game in the same vein as Star Fox, albeit released before the age of polygonal 3D graphics.

The game uses fairly simple, repetitive landscapes in its graphics, although they do use sprites to simulate things like canyons. Mostly this works well enough considering the limitations of the era the game was originally made in, but this has the problem common to games of this sort – it is often difficult to determine where things are relative to each other in the 3D space as… well, there isn’t a 3D space per se, but a facsimile created with sprites and background animations.

The gameplay here, when it works, is great, having you targeting enemies as you’re flying around at high speeds. Unfortunately, it so rarely works well. It’s frustrating when you have crosshairs over an enemy yet don’t seem to be hitting them, it’s frustrating when you try to turn to put your target on an enemy and the game responds with an excruciatingly slow turn… however, the biggest frustration here is the way the game incorporates barrel rolls into the gameplay.

In theory, this is a great gameplay element, giving players an evasive maneuver for when they’re targeted from the back. However, the way to do this move is to quickly move left and then right (or vice versa), which makes it all too easy to accidentally do the move when you’re simply trying to move around and aim. Multiple times while playing, I accidentally performed a barrel roll that caused me to slam into a cliff face or something else and die.

While I have my frustrations with the game itself, as usual developer M2 has done a fantastic job with the port, including a few different game modes, as well as their usual save states, replays, online leaderboards, different display options, music player, the works. Plus, I have to note one element that’s been added here that makes a huge difference – the HD rumble, which gives the game a great feeling of feedback as you’re flying around and shooting. This coupled with their recreation of the seat-tilting arcade cabinet makes for a really great presentation.

Having said that, while this is a great port with an excellent presentation, it’s a great port of a game with some serious flaws, and even the high quality of this port doesn’t gloss over those flaws. If you’re a fan of Sega’s classic arcade days, you might find this a nice trip down memory lane, but for most this is a game best left in the past.

tl;dr – G-LOC is a faux-3D On-Rails Shooter originally released to arcades in 1990, and while this is a superb port that does a great job recreating the arcade experience on a home console, the game at the center of it all is extremely flawed, with the outdated graphics making it difficult to aim, and the frustrating controls causing problems turning and even bigger problems with accidental barrel roll maneuvers. Unless you’re a Sega die-hard, skip this one.

Grade: C-

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