Bucky'O Hare (Arcade) CO-OP Playthrough / More space wars, this time involving animals.
31Bucky O'Hare (1992) by Konami is Super colorful game seeming a first glance, hiding a rather serious dark theme, not too suitable for children. We are talking, of course, about the theme of the game..... The heroes belong to a federation of different races (animals), fighting against an evil, aggressive, brainwashed space frogs. Their intentions are total invasion, meaning enslavement, plunder and total domination over other races. It is definitely not the best material for the youngest but when the game is so colorful it is automatically justified :D. I, of course, have nothing against such a representation of the world, but when you see such a graphical style where your eyes literally puke rainbows, however, you expect something completely different or at least somewhat toned down. The game is a kind of beat 'em up, only that it's mainly focused on mid-range combat, which means we'll mainly use firearms in the form of plasma pistols and grenades. There is not much choice when it comes to weapons... basically we use the same gun all the time, whose bullets we can only strengthen by taking the appropriate power up along the way. Grenades are a typical special, whose task is to inflict massive damage all over the screen, while when you get close enough and hold down the fire button, the character starts to attack melee. This deals a lot of damage but is dangerous . The only real difference is in the four available characters. The only thing that really differs between the four characters available in the game are the special attacks that are performed by hitting the shoot button and releasing it. Bucky has mini grenades, Jenny has a kind of guided missile, Dead eye Duck an area attack that clockwise rotates and pools to increase its area of effect and Blinky, meanwhile, has something like a flamethrower with limited range but massive damage. In between stages there are flying, horizontal as well as vertical levels. Apart from the fact that in these stages we don't have any influence on scrolling, they don't really differ from the usual ones, so it's some variety there, but not too much. The game is generally very good only that it unfortunately lacks a bit of variety, because shooting in a beat'em up game, well it's not as good as a full hand-to-hand combat system. As for me, the game should rather be implemented as standard run and gun games like Contra, and it would come out all much better. And so we have a beat' em up game that isn't really one..... which is a strange solution. But you also have to admit that this makes the game quite unique and unusual compared to the competition of that period. Personally, we think that the game is good and we can safely recommend it to anyone.
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"Music by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio"