D-Force (SNES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
263A playthrough of Asmik's 1991 shoot 'em up for the Super Nintendo, D-Force.
Played through on the normal difficulty level.
By Christmas of 1991, thirty-one titles had been published for the brand new SNES console in the United States. The launch window library had something for everybody, from platformers to racing games, RPGs to sports, and a lot of these games are (and have always been) recognized as classics.
Several of them, however, were not classics. A few were legitimately terrible, but most of the lesser-known games were merely mediocre titles that were more-or-less fine, but they didn't stand a chance against the competition.
D-Force is one such game. (Short for Dimension Force - get your mind out of the gutter already!)
It's a 2D, vertically-scrolling shooter featuring a helicopter, a bit like Tiger Heli on the NES. There's a simple weapon upgrade system in place, and the stages alternate between "shooting" and "exploration" modes.
The star "feature" of D-Force is the exploration mode. It's much the same as shooting mode, but while "exploring," you can smack a shoulder button to switch between two altitudes, similar to what was done in Dragonstrike on NES and Vertical Force on Virtual Boy. The idea is to provide two separate playing fields, each with their own hazards to contend with, presumably meant to give you a choice in how to play these stages. To pull this off, the game zooms in on the background when your chopper moves closer to the ground using the SNES's fancy-schmancy mode 7 effects.
The effect is a clear bid to show off a flashy effect made possible by the new hardware, but given how rare it is that you'd encounter threats on both the upper and lower layers when switching between them, its inclusion comes across as a bit shallow and pointless.
And unfortunately, that's a good way to describe the game itself. I do enjoy playing it sometimes, but it's simple to a fault: it feels like an early 8-bit shooter. The enemy formations are repetitive and predictable, many of the bosses can be blatantly cheesed to death by hiding in spots they can't reach, and you get no say at all in your weapon upgrades. There are no speed-changing mechanics or screen clearing bombs, and you can't fire your cannons independently of your missiles. Most of the game consists of holding B and moving left and right, no thought required. It's a simple design, and it's one that functions fine here. There's no complexity to it, but sometimes a braindead game can be a lot of fun.
The presentation drags the entire production down hard, though. The graphics are ugly - a problem that is brought into sharp relief when the heavily pixelated background zooms in. The backdrops are lifeless and drab with little animation, and enemies are constantly repeated between stages. The bullets blend into the scenery way too well, and their movement updates at a slower rate than the backgrounds. Bullets that jump from moment-to-moment make it really frustrating to try to track and avoid enemy fire.
The sound isn't great, either, but it is amusingly random. The title screen plays the French national anthem, the ending plays the Russian anthem, and the ice stage features.... the ET theme? What?
D-Force isn't a terrible game - it seems to accomplish what it set out to do - but it's sorely lacking in character, polish, and creativity, and when you're in direct competition with the likes of Gradius III, Darius Twin, Super R-Type, and UN Squadron - the other SNES shooters available in 1991 - you need to do something really special to stand out. D-Force fails to realize that.
I will give it props for its hilariously suggestive name, though. Gotta wonder if it's related somehow to The D Show ;)
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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