#warpspeed

Warpspeed is an obscure old space flight combat game for the Sega Genesis. There's very little presence of the game online, and sadly a good deal of what there is is people just trashing the game. As I was replaying the game myself to record some of its music, I thought I would write up a review to see if the game holds up for me or if I'm just being nostalgic about it.

The story is quite simple, you're a pilot in space and alien forces are warping into the quadrant to attack your star-base. In this universe, black holes have been discovered to actually be warps between quadrants that you can use as short cuts!

When you start up, you'll be treated to a nice looking intro, followed with a text screen explaining the story. Then you get the mission select screen, where you can play the games missions in any order. There's also a small options menu where you can adjust things like the music and difficulty.

The game-play is simple, but when it behaves itself, I find it quite charming, comparable to Wolfenstein 3ds game-play of running through a maze killing nazis. Each quadrant is broken up into squares on your map screen, and you can slowly fly through each square or warp between them. Empty squares will be full of asteroids that you can shoot up for bonus points. Other squares will contain things like enemy fights, your home base, or a black hole. Visiting your home base will get your ship repaired, and play a nice little music tune. Black holes will warp you to other quadrants, and enemy fighters will initiate combat. Most of the missions will have some sort of gimmick to them, such as taking out carrier ships, flying blind with no enemy detection your map, or fending off a nexus of black holes all in quadrant.

The home base dock always looked like it had cute cartoony eyes to me. :D

The games combat is really the only place where I can say it does falter, even as a gal who is viewing the game through nostalgia goggles. The enemy fighters seem to always be either really easy (holding still while you gun them down) to beat or really annoying (constantly dodging to the side endlessly while you hope one of your stray shots will somehow hit them). Maybe I'm just bad at the game, but when enemies do the latter, it was very tedious for me. I also wish the game had an auto-fire option for my energy weapons, as having to spam the fire button over and over can get painful over time (especially for older players).

One nice thing that does spice up the game-play is that you will randomly receive extra missions during game-play. Sometimes you will be asked by friendlies to visit and gather data in certain areas, and other times one of the games goofy looking enemies will challenge you to a duel. Points are what earn you your medals and ship upgrades as well, which is a nice as in most games of this time a High Score didn't usually get you any special goodies in games.

The game does shine in its visual and audio presentation. The graphics are very nice (especially the satisfying explosions of enemy fighters), the sound design is well done, and I really love the games very quiet and minimalist soundtrack that emphasizes the lonely isolation of drifting through space.

Still, In closing, while Warpspeed looks and sounds nice, but the game-play is just okay in small bursts. Sadly the annoying enemy ship A.I. and the endless button mashing to fire (unless you have a turbo controller) hurts the experience quit a bit, but when combat is going well the game can be a fun simple space shooter.

Engage🔊