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Originally released as Gunspike in Japan, the re-named Cannon Spike
is a blast-em-up, allowing you to play as one of several old favourite Capcom
characters (apparently, since I've never heard of them), including Charlie,
Arthur, Shiba, Cammy, Simone, not all of who look human, because they're not
really.
Played out with a 3D isometric view, the idea is simple. Wave after wave of
terrorist robots are coming for you and your task is to avoid their fire whilst
returning plenty of your own. Once a level is clear, you'll travel round the
world on your high-powered motor boots to another place and do battle there
too.
It actually looks a bit like the old arcade and ZX Spectrum favourite Target:
Renegade and Alien Breed, where enemies approach you from all sides and you've got to do
exactly as described above, except with arcade-quality graphics.
While the graphics are far from revolutionary, since they look like a tarted-up
game from the 80s, they certainly shift about at the required speed and I
didn't notice any slow-down. Don't expect your DC to be overheating from
playing this one though.
As for the sound, it's a bit of techno here, a bit of a Bontempi keyboard organ
there, also harking back to the arcades of 10-15 years ago. There's nothing
wrong with that at all since it creates the right atmosphere and you can laugh
at all of those who claim that retro is "soooo yesterday!"
The gameplay's a tricky fella though. One minute you're able to fend off the
horde of baddies with a constant stream of gunfire before they explode - which
is easy, as well as trying to circle round them and spraying fire as you go -
yet, the next, they're either up close which means that the gunfire
appears to go right through them(!) and they're taking a swipe out of you, or
one of the big end-of-level bosses has got you cornered and you have little or
no hope of evading him, so you may as well turn round and bend over while he
dilly-dallies with his great big cannon spike!
Overall, it is a fun game, but one that'll have you questioning its longevity,
so for the casual gamer it is certainly worth a rental, but don't forget that
those with a PC should easily be able to find something similar to this on
the internet, such as using MAME and looking for the aforementioned
game ROMs.
For those without such access it's definitely worth a rental. I would've
advised a purchase, given it's cheap price, for some multiplayer post-pub
gaming with your mates, but try as I might I cannot find anything other than
a single-player mode which rather spoils things a bit.
GRAPHICS SOUND EFFECTS AND MUSIC PLAYABILITY ORIGINALITY ENJOYMENT
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Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.