Warhead (Amiga) - A Playguide and Review - by LemonAmiga.com
85Warhead is a 3D shooter and galaxy simulator, which came on just one disk, marketed by MPH/Activision in 1989. We take command of a FOE-57 fighter, ready with missiles, mines, x-ray lasers and cannons, in an attempt to save us all from the invading alien scum.
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Production Notes:
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Captured: 21st Oct 2020 (one take, 50mins)@60fps
Narrated: 17 May 2021
Edited: 19 Nov 2020 - 27 Oct 2021
Stepping through the time portal back to 1993, my Amiga 500 030 sat on a very heavy wooden desk, which had a thick deep red leather surface on the top. I still have (and use) this desk today, as my everyday computer desk where I sit to type this. To the left and right are wooden pull-out drawers, which still bare some of the magazine cover-disk labels I stuck on there, when I re-used the disks. In the left drawer is where I kept all of my games; both copies and originals; safely individually stored in clear plastic disk pockets; each with colour coded disk labels, and the name of the game written in pencil in my neatest handwriting. The first row of disks (with blue labels) were my driving games. In the middle row, I had platformers (yellow) and adventures (green), and then in the third row of disks I had Action games (red) and my PD stuff. I guess Warhead fell into the Action catagory.
I remember the first time I saw this game on a friends Amiga, and was immediately impressed. I'd played Paul Woakes Mercenary and Second City on my C64, but this had filled in graphics, and felt like several steps up in quality. I watched my friend as he launched from the star base and followed the instructions on the screen. We were both unsure of how to get in to the star base, and crashed into it. I begged to copy the game and took it home. Every so often, I remember loading this up, hoping to get somewhere, but never did. Over the years, the game seemed to take on a mythical quality - the legend of the game which looked amazing, but nobody could play.
Fast forward to 2020, and somehow I loaded this up in the mood to finally unlock its secrets. During several practice goes, I pressed every key on the keyboard in an attempt to find the key to land the ship, not knowing it was automatic. After trial and error, somehow I fluked a landing, and quickly saved this up as a savestate. From there I played the training missions up to the first 'Patrol', and then reset the game and started the recorder. As expected, I didnt manage to land the ship in the star base, so I had to use the savestate to get me to that point. From there I recorded all of this footage in one take, and cut out the flight times (or speeded these up) in the edit.
I think I was supposed to use the Mines instead of blowing my ship up in one training mission, but it worked in my trial run, so I did it again. I had no clue what I was doing in the battle scenario but thats why people learn to master these types of games. It felt good to finally understand Warhead a little bit more, after all these years.
Danscore:
The presentation, box art, and initial stages of Warhead seem intimidating; even for experienced players; because of a whole set of controls and key operations the player has to learn, and flight dynamics the player has to master from the word "go". Warhead throws you in at the deep end, expecting a perfect landing in order to get any further with the experience. I'd say as soon as the Flight Test mission 1 has been done, the rest of the game seemed to open and unlock very quickly, and the feeling of progress was fun. The training missions eventually give way to a set of tasks with primary objectives, such as Escort missions, seek and destroy, recon, and patrol. I have read players suggesting the missions are very quickly over, and apart from having to go into a Black Hole at one point to fulfil the objective, they feel only the tip of what could have been a very huge iceberg - like Elite. The atmosphere is deep, but dog-fighting can be hit or miss, depending on how many missiles you waste knocking out enemy missiles. Gameplay feels rather shallow, and is mostly a matter of taking down enemies and survival. For what this tried to do I'd say it deserves 8 out of 10.