The Turbografx-16 console was no slouch when it came to scrolling shooters of both the horizontal and vertical variety. North America got its fare share of domestic releases, but many of the best were left in Japan. The subject of today’s review is one of these such games. Download was released for the PC Engine, the Japanese version of the Turbografx-16 console, in 1990. From what I gather it has a cult following and is one of the many import recommendations I found during my research. While it’s not particularly memorable, Download (now that’s an innocuous title) is a decent romp that’s good clean fun. Keep reading this review to find out if it’s worth playing.
There’s some sort of story here but what it’s about is anyone’s guess. I don’t speak or read Japanese, and while there’s a surprising amount of English text here all of the story exposition is in moon speak as far as my understanding goes. What I can ascertain is that this game takes place in the future and follows a cyberpunk motif with anime characters fighting against an army of robots. The story is told through still scenes and dialogue, and the production values of these sequences are pretty good considering the year it was released.
Download is a side scrolling shooter. You guide the main character’s spaceship through six auto scrolling post apocalyptic stages dodging projectiles and hundreds of robotic enemies along the way. This is not one of those ‘one hit kills’ affairs (thank goodness) and your ship instead has a life bar and you start the stage over when it is depleted. What is nice is the fact that, while you do lose your weapon upgrades upon doing so, you can continue endlessly. Hardcore fans will scoff at this principle, but I found it welcome from the sea of unforgiving shooters of this era.
The weapon system is very basic and by the books. What’s nice is you can choose between two different types of shots at the start of each stage, either the Vulcan or laser, and have three options as far as support weapons go. I find that the shield and homing shots are equally useful, and so I just stick with those and ignore the third choice. I can’t even remember what it is to be honest. Download would be a more interesting game if players were offered the chance to change your weapon on the fly, but that’s a small complaint. There are four different power-ups you’ll find in each stage and include a recovery item, upgrade to your main weapon, recharge of your secondary item, and a bomb that destroys all enemies on screen. These are released from specific crafts and change periodically so if you need something in particular you can just wait to collect the power up until it cycles to the one you had in mind.
Download is a pretty entertaining game with elaborate boss encounters (these offer a lot of variety too) and gameplay scenarios that will keep you on your toes. It’s pretty fun, but Download isn’t without its issues. For starters the game is a little easy even pretending for a moment that you can’t continue endlessly. No one section of the game took me more than one try as the patterns aren’t that hard to notice and there’s usually a safe portion of the screen you can hang out on. The boss encounters are also pretty easy and all have at least one easy to figure out strategy wherein you can dodge every attack easily. Figuring these out is the biggest challenge the game offers, but even that won’t leave anyone scratching their head. It’s rewarding, but I would have liked it if these patterns were more puzzling.
In addition Download is a darn short game. My first time through took me under an hour to complete, and the second was around half that. I don’t expect most games of this era to span weeks or even days, but it felt like I had barely sat down before the credits started rolling. This is one case where the difficulty should have been turned up, or the developers should have included a greater variety of weapons to make it more replayable. Two is too few, and many shooters released prior to this offered more variety in this regard. As it stands Download just doesn’t have enough content even by the system standards. High scores just aren’t enough to keep players coming back in this case because there’s not enough of a challenge.
My final complaint is a very minor one. Download, despite going with cyberpunk motif, just doesn’t have much style. It looks very generic especially when out side by side with other PC Engine offerings such as Super Star Soldier and Soldier Blade. The enemy design are entirely too generic with and there’s no overarching identity to this game. It’s visually bland, and with such a rich theme to explore the artists failed to come up with anything interesting. There’s a big emphasis on the story and I’m sure it adds something to the experience, but I doubt it makes up for these shortcomings. The Turbografx-16 has a huge library of shooters and the fact that the developers seem to not even have tried to give this one its own identity is hugely disappointing. It’s no wonder Download is rarely brought by the most hardcore fans of the genre.
Download lacks a clear identity which makes the visuals boring overall. There are some decent effects such as multiple layers of parallax scrolling, and tons of on screen projectiles without even a hint of slowdown, but it’s hard to care when everything just seems to blend together. I prefer my shooters colorful and the palette here is just plain drab. It almost looks like it was painted over with a coating of NES graphics to be honest, and were it not for the effects and solid engine I wouldn’t be surprised in the least to find out this was a Master System release. Even worse than the visual style (or lack thereof) is the soundtrack. The hardware might be limited, but it was proven many times that an inspired composer could produce magic from the archaic bleeps and blips. That wasn’t the case here. Nothing sounds particularly clear, and there’s a high pitched quality to the music that is far from pleasant. It almost sounds like that trademark screeching effect you hear in so many Sega Genesis games, and no, that’s not a compliment. You’re better off muting this one.
Download has its issues, and there are a lot of shooters that are significantly better not only from the same era, but also on the same system. Many of these don’t even need to be imported. I imagine the reason this one has the cult following it does is because of the simple fact that it’s rare. It has almost no style, is very forgettable, ugly and sounds bad. With that said Download is still a mildly entertaining game. It won’t push most experienced gamers, but the various scenarios, and boss encounters are pretty fun. Finding safe places to wait, or memorizing patterns are both more rewarding than you’d expect here. I recommend Download, but just barely, and mostly to gamers who are looking for an easier scrolling shooter that’s low on penalty and generally kind of relaxing. Now if only I can figure out what’s going on in the story…
