Metal Combat: Falcon's Revenge (SNES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
694A playthrough of Nintendo's 1993 light gun rail shooter for the SNES, Metal Combat: Falcon's Revenge.
Metal Combat, the sequel to Nintendo's 1992 thoroughly excellent Battle Clash, somehow improves on just the original just about as much as humanly possible. The amount of work put into the sequel really puts many other follow-up titles to shame - it's clear that the guys (and women, if there were any) responsible for Metal Combat cared a great deal for how this one turned out.
The basic concept is the same - and really, how could it not be? It's still a SuperScope game. You are "partner", the nameless hero that sits in the gunner seat of the Falcon mech. In Battle Clash, "partner" and Mike (the pilot) took care of the ever-watchful eye of evil by going to the moon and blowing it up. At the beginning of Metal Combat, three years have passed since the end of Battle Clash, and (spoiler alert!) suddenly the bad guys are back!!
The scale is a lot more epic this time - rather than being confined to the Earth and its moon, this adventure spans much of the solar system. The mech has been upgraded as well - in addition to the new, more varied and more regularly given power up items, the Falcon's charge gun now has three stages of power (whereas in BC you had one, it was either charged or it wasn't), which gives you much more leeway this time in deciding how you want to pace battles. Do you risk not being able to fire for a few seconds in hopes of nailing the baddie with a super-high power shot, or do you play it safe by sticking to faster, weaker fire? It's an interesting shift in the mechanics, and one that adds a better element of strategy to timing in the battles.
The graphics and sounds have benefit from a major kick in the behind - the robots are bigger, more detailed, better animated, and the backgrounds do some really crazy scaling stuff, especially in the later fights. There is also a nicely put together tutorial/introduction to kick things off. Though it seems completely unnecessary in a game like this, it does make the game a bit more immediately accessible to first-timers, and it also sets a nice and consistent tone for how the game establishes its story.
Again, it's a SuperScope game, and that controller wasn't really ideal for many things. Like with Battle Clash, I can only imagine the game's lack of popularity and sales was a direct result of the controller it required - by the end of '93 when this came out, did anyone care at all about the bazooka light-gun anymore? It's not like many did when it was new (though I admit I had one and I loved it, even with the sore neck and shoulder I always ended up with afterward), but this game clearly had a lot of effort put into it and it's extremely good - and it got virtually no recognition. /Sad face
I still recommend this one today, but I wouldn't bother with a real SuperScope if you have access to a working one. Play it on the Wii and use the Zapper - truth be told, it's a better experience that way.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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